> But while Isaac is a Joyent employee, Ben is not—and if he had been, he wouldn't be as of this morning: to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent.
For comparison, here is bnoordhuis's comment from the pull request thread [2] that the post is referencing:
> Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that.
Honestly, Joyent's post strikes me as a horrible overreaction and attempt at character assassination over what should have been a small matter. Rejecting pull requests that only correct typos or comments has been standard practice for the Node.js project for a long time now--this isn't the first one to be closed for being too small of a change, a fact that Joyent, as the main driver of the project, should be aware of.
bnoordhuis followed standard procedure, yet Joyent tries to cast him as being intentionally sexist and a terrible person. Seeing such immature behavior coming from their corporate blog--calling him an "asshole", saying he should be fired, insinuating that they wish they could kick him out of the project--has pretty much destroyed the respect I had for the company.
For the record, I support using gender-neutral pronouns; I actually support the original pull request. But it seems inarguable that:
1. It's a minor change
2. Node.js, like many projects, rejects minor changes
3. It was rejected for being a minor change
4. Joyent reacted amazingly unprofessionally
In particular, I have concerns both with the way the initial decision was reversed (this seems like an abuse of Joyent's power over the project), and in particular with their remarkable blog post. Following a project's guidelines on accepting a commit is "gobsmackingly inappropriate"? Really? I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that attitude from someone in Joyent's position. And as for their pointed comment that they would have fired Ben if he worked for them...really? Boy do they sound like a barrel of fun to work for. "Follow the rules or be fired; unless it's a rule we decide isn't important, then we'll fire you if you do follow it. Have fun guessing which one is which!"
I use Node.js professionally, and I will continue to do so for now. My opinion of Joyent, however, is dropping rapidly. Node.js will either grow beyond them or die.
Edit: Rephrased the language to better reflect my opinion. Had too much hyperbole in the first draft.
The contributor also had not signed a CLA, and the commit message did not follow the guidelines.
Ben should have been more explicit in his initial post about his reason for denying the commit. Isaac shouldn't have merged the pull, which violated the guidelines. The community shouldn't have raised their pitchforks without first seeking an explanation.
Everyone involved could use a dose of professionalism.
God yes. It feels like everyone involved went out of their way to make things worse at every step.
An invalid but well-meaning pull request? Better give it a cryptic rejection. A rejected by politically sensitive pull request? Better pull rank and force its acceptance in violation of project guidelines. Main project backers violating project guidelines? Better reverse their commits with a passive aggressive commit message. Project lead reversing commits? Better post a vitriolic blog post about how he is a terrible asshole who should be fired!
Would it have been that hard to bounce a couple of emails back and forth, and sort it all out in private? Christ.
(Add good point about the CLA. Although needing a CLA to change a pronoun in the docs seems silly, I think it highlights that a pull request was the wrong tool for this.)
A signed CLA may seem silly, but there were changes in code comments. That makes code ownership ambiguous, and the law doesn't tend to play nice with ambiguity.
Oh, I know. You shouldn't play games with code ownership; CLAs are important for any commit.
I was just thinking that this could have been handled better via an email to a committer who already had a signed CLA. Would have sidestepped a lot of drama. Oh well.
Ben was called a bigot and his rejection of the pull request was ascribed to the "principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered" (from the Joyent blog). The problem is, all of this is being extrapolated from his statement "sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that", which could be seen as a flippant dismissal of gender issues in the tech industry - or it could be simply a curt response acknowledging standard practice ('rejecting pull requests that only correct typos or comments'). Only Ben really knows Ben's intention - and he didn't clarify it in either of the long comment threads on github. (If he did make explicitly misogynistic follow-up comments please correct me; I didn't see any myself.)
Maybe he was insensitive or tone-deaf, maybe he should have made an exception (because perhaps commits like these have some sort of special significance that goes beyond simply fixing spacing issues in comments), maybe people should have talked to him and explained why others might have found his actions questionable - and, some of this did happen - but the hysterical response is really sort of scary. Wikipedia has an "assume good faith" principle - maybe something similar would be a good idea for open-source communities, so that problems and differences in opinion could be resolved before escalation into a screaming match?
Ben: "If this is what I have to deal with, then I'd just as rather do something else."
After this all-smoke-no-flame shitstorm, one big company carrying out a character assassination and publicly wishing they could fire him and his current employer dangling a Damocles' sword over his job...I really can't blame him.
"To me as a non-native speaker, the difference between 'him' and 'them' seems academic but hey, if it gets us scores of female contributors, who am I to object?"
"To the people that felt it necessary to call me a misogynist: I volunteer in a mentorship program that gets young people - especially young women - involved in technology. How many of you go out and actively try to increase the number of women in the field?"
This is sort of like the "but my best friend is black" defense, but in this case I think it demonstrates that defense is not always invalid.
Your spin attempt ignored the part where he reverted someone else's commit with a threatening message. Nobody would ge talking about it if he had simply ignored it or asked Isaac about it first.
Here's his revert message, copied from below, in the full:
"@isaacs may have his commit bit but that does not mean he is at liberty to land patches at will. All patches have to be signed off by either me or Bert. Isaac, consider yourself chided."
Refers to a procedural matter, kind of snarky. Hardly 'threatening'. Does not discuss the pronoun, content of the revert, or any content related to gender issues at all.
By the way, it's rather fatuous to refer to my comment as a 'spin attempt' just because I didn't reflexively grab my pitchfork and torch and run out to join the mob trying to crucify this developer as a incorrigible misogynist, but asked for evidence and clarification instead. Food for thought.
I would really appreciate it if acdha could explain how they view this comment as a threat. acdha made the same claim elsewhere in this thread as well.
It appears that some people are attempting to lower the bar for something to be a "threat" to be any statement made by someone they don't like (or they've been told not to like).
Between the commit wording and his comment on IRC (https://twitter.com/ArmyOfBruce/status/406802499014627328) I read that as implicitly threatening Isaac's commit bit but that was wrong. I shouldn't have stated that: it would have been more accurate to describe it as confrontational rather than a threat.
> By the way, it's rather fatuous to refer to my comment as a 'spin attempt' just because I didn't reflexively grab my pitchfork and torch and run out to join the mob trying to crucify this developer as a incorrigible misogynist
I described it as spin because it focused on the initial commit & the grammar issues rather than the way Ben chose to escalate it. Your choice of quotes and commentary focused on the beginning rather than what happened afterwards, neatly omitting the actual focus of the discussion. Perhaps that was accidental but it sure looks like an attempt to minimize the offense before criticizing the response.
Looking through the closed pull requests it does not seem like rejecting typo pull requests is in fact standard practice. There are multiple accepted pull requests that merely fix typos. Additionally, if you look at the context of the full pull request he's commenting on, he completely ignores the dozen's of other comments on the issue, simply stating they're rejecting it because it's trivial.
I'm not saying he's necessarily sexist, but he clearly doesn't care about combating sexism. Is it really that hard to say "we're not accepting this because a typo is not a significant enough change." Calling the change trivial is literally calling out using ungendered language as trivial. I promise you it is not trivial to a lot of people.
The post at Joyent is eye-popping and Bryan Cantrill comes across as a horrible person. In just four sanctimonious, power-hungry and smug paragraphs he makes Joyent look like a toxic entity I would never want to deal with.
My understanding of Node.JS and libuv community is as an outsider. I don't follow what's going on unless it is on the front page of HN once in a while and other forums.
But one impression I get from Node.JS and its surrounding community is arrogance and immaturity. This is from top to down -- companies sponsoring it (Joyent) and many of its vocal proponents. I see plenty of energy, enthusiasm, but mixed with immaturity. "We don't know what are doing, but darn it! we will be very vocal and do it with lots of enthusiasm".
One guy doesn't want to commit a trivial change. It blows up into a media shitstorm. Reverted commits. Joyent's reaction is what surprised me -- "While we would fire Ben over this". This guy doesn't even work for them. Hypothetically firing people, hmm, so committed to Women's Rights, they are hypothetically hiring and firing this person. Have they talked to him in private? StrongLoop, a company I never heard of until this point, is a bit more mature, that's good to see, but even they couldn't resist the veiled threat.
What is sad, as a whole this episode just reinforced the (hopefully wrong) stereotype I have of the community. Joyent instead of helping the community (which I think they thought they did by writing that blog post), are hurting it.
Buying into and spending time and money learning a platform/language is also an implicit buy in/participation in the community. So far it screams to me "stay away". Hopefully it will grow up at some point.
That statement feels a little to intimate for an outsider to the company. Ben made a mistake but to single out and threaten him like that in public would surely alienate him further.
This entire situation has gotten extremely out of hand. It shows how activists can turn into extremists when faced with an adversary. I'm in no way advocating what Ben did but it's despicable how everyone jumped onto the bandwagon to exacerbate and publicize what should have been a minor event dealt with on employer-employee basis, not a public shaming.
Thank you for pointing that out. What the fuck is it with these high-levels treating people like some easily replacable, unhuman commodity? Don't ever speculate firing people like that in public, just fucking don't.
It's important that everyone knows that violations against political correctness are serious things. Whether a person calls a commit that changes "he" to "they" trivial, or refuses to assert that women are at least as intelligent, if not more, than men, or attributes Africa's problems to something other than racism and exploitation, it is important that that person loses their job.
Otherwise, how will people know who holds the power - straight White non-Jewish men, that is.
Those people are already far beyond the pale, but I was referring to more benign cultural explanations. A professor was fired for his "racist" suggestion that cultural differences could help explain the relative poor performance of Black Kenyans relative to Indian Kenyans in running local businesses.
The sad irony is that this man committed suicide over this, and that he was a committed liberal anti-racist. In this case the progressives had no compunction in sacrificing one of their own.
I was really taken aback when I read that as well. I don't have the thickest skin and I would have probably just retreated into the forest if someone ever wrote that about me.
I wrote that. I didn't mean it literally. It’s a response to Bryan saying that failure to be sensitive to gender issues would be a firing offense at his company. We take it really seriously, and I’d like to point out that two of our senior leaders are women and we are proud to employ talented women engineers. If this remained an issue, I’d need to find a way to rectify it with Ben, and that could get as serious as firing. But he understands now. In the rest of my post I make the point that jumping to firing him publicly was not giving him a sufficient chance nor crediting him for his efforts elsewhere.
You didn't fire him publicly. You only belittled him in public.
> If Ben can’t learn, we’ll fire him. [Edit: See comment below. This is not meant literally.]
Your correction doesn't make the statement much better. This whole debate is about how words matter, and yet your words put him on notice in a public place. All of Ben's friends now know his employer will fire him if he "can't learn." Is he so stubbornly misogynistic that that should be in question?
You could have conveyed the same message by saying "he was following the commit rules, no offense intended, won't happen again" and left it at that.
Yeah, I'm sorry, but you guys have just proven everyone right in criticizing the node.js community as a bunch of arrogant, immature hotheads. What is it with this discussing of firing someone in public?
And please don't tell me you didn't mean it literally. If you're joking or bluffing about firing someone, it's going to make you look even worse.
Don't you remember how everyone viewed that AOL CEO who fired someone in public a few months back? Well, please understand that people view this public threatening of firing in exactly the same way.
For what it's worth, I completely agree with the pull request. But you all couldn't have possibly handled this any worse.
Then you shouldn't have wrote it because most people and every reporter are going to take it literally.
Since pronouns are an issue that you want the node.js community to be correct about, would words with significance in certain cultures also be high on your priority list?
Issac, I realize that you had the best intentions in this, I see that you were trying to put out stupid fires rather than start another one, and I appreciate your willingness to criticize the crass and inappropriate response from Joyent. All that said, and please take it as friendly criticism: your tone towards the developer came across as unnecessarily belittling, and the phrase about firing, even if not meant literally, crossed the line. Yet another post would probably just add fuel to the fire, but I would seriously consider a private face-to-face apology, if I were you. Thanks for listening.
The guy who wrote the initial pull request should get some sort of medal for efficiency in trolling, it's not common that you can make this many alleged professionals look like idiots with a 3 character patch.
I'm sorry, but the entire notion that using masculine pronouns somehow implies sexism is complete bullshit.
That's how the English language works. "He" is used as both neuter and masculine. There is no "it" pronoun.
Please, for the love of all that is holy, stop fighting about this. Unless someone actually did something sexist, this is a linguistic bikeshed to end all bikesheds.
Childish community behavior aside, the entire argument is a moot point. There is NOTHING sexist about using "he".
Given it's possibly (likely) ostracizing and there's nothing categorically wrong about using "they" as a singular neuter pronoun, I think you're on the wrong side of this.
People should certainly stop fighting; the answer is to just roll with "they".
Thanks for all those links — I wasn't aware of those studies (especially not about the deliberate effort to force the singular "they" out of use) and I think they have definitely influenced my conscious personal writing style (I do tend to avoid gendered pronouns anyway).
I will agree that I was on the wrong side of this in the sense that "he" is more or equally preferable to "they", but I made another point too — that this entire topic is a giant bikeshed.
You say "people should certainly stop fighting", but do you then imply that fighting for "they" is justified? Personally, I don't think it is.
I use gender-neutral pronouns unless context dictates otherwise, but I want you to consider something.
If a policy (or lack thereof) is correlated with women feeling excluded or intimidated, it doesn't necessarily mean that the policy (or lack thereof) is a bad thing.
If women tend to feel intimidated by eye contact with men with whom they are in competition, it doesn't mean such eye contact should be banned. If women tend to feel feel excluded if the founding members of an organization or club are all men, it doesn't mean men should be forced to find a woman before founding an organization or club.
It's true that historically "he" has often been used a generic pronoun, but singular "they" also has a long history. I'd start with this Wikipedia article:
> Proponents of gender-neutral language argue that the use of gender-specific language often implies male superiority or reflects an unequal state of society. According to The Handbook of English Linguistics, generic masculine pronouns and gender-specific job titles are instances "where English linguistic convention has historically treated men as prototypical of the human species." Words that refer to women often devolve in meaning, frequently taking on sexual overtones.
> These differences in usage are criticized on two grounds: one, that they reflect a biased state of society, and two, that they help to uphold that state. Studies of children, for instance, indicate that the words children hear affect their perceptions of the gender-appropriateness of certain careers. Other research has demonstrated that men and women apply for jobs in more equal proportions when gender-neutral language is used in the advertisement, as opposed to the generic he or man.
Many years ago, I would have agreed with you that using "he" as neuter was correct and therefore preferable to singular "they". I no longer feel that way. I'd attribute that change in opinion to two causes:
One, I'm less concerned with by-the-book "correctness" and pedantry, and more concerned with the real-world effect my words have on people.
Two, I now realize that English is a living, evolving language, and there is no one authority on what is or is not correct usage. What is widely held to be proper English at a given time is a product of who happened to have influence in society at that time, no more, no less.
Also, although this is not what changed my opinion, I find it interesting to note that many of the same people who call the matter trivial will also expend considerable time and effort defending generic "he". If you find it so trivial, why not humor the people who think gender-neutral language is important?
Thanks for your comment and for the information. I definitely agree with your point that the singular "they" is, at this point in time, as correct or more correct than the neuter "he".
I also totally agree with your point about humoring people who actually care passionately about this — that's precisely my issue with this whole debacle. I wasn't taking the position that "he" is the only correct option, and other phrasings must be attacked. Rather, that the entire matter is a bikeshed, and that people should not assume that just because someone used "he" as neuter that he (see what I did there?) is sexist.
Yeah for sure the english language couldn't possibly itself be influenced by sexism. That's just how it works. We should just accept it.
The pronoun itself isn't sexist it's the reason behind it's use. Beyond indicating (possible) differences in biological sex, what purpose does using a gendered pronoun serve? It doesn't add information, it merely reinforces gender norms.
> Yeah for sure the english language couldn't possibly itself be influenced by sexism. That's just how it works. We should just accept it.
That was not my point, nor do I believe I implied that. I acknowledge that the original reason why English's nonspecific/neuter pronoun is the same as the masculine is almost certainly because of ages-old sexism and masculo-normativity.
> The pronoun itself isn't sexist it's the reason behind it's use.
I completely agree. Do you think sexism was intended in the original code comment? If not, then by your logic there was nothing sexist about using "he" and "him".
> Beyond indicating (possible) differences in biological sex, what purpose does using a gendered pronoun serve? It doesn't add information, it merely reinforces gender norms.
I agree, from a 21st century perspective it seems absurd to not have a neutral/neuter/nonspecific pronoun. But it is an established point of English grammar and language that the masculine pronoun is because there does not exist a neutral/neuter/nonspecific one. Using "they" and "them" and those forms is a relatively recent development of modern language. Personally, I tend to use them very often because I don't want to offend anyone, and I think their usage as an "official unofficial" neutral/neuter/nonspecific pronoun is well on its way to becoming the de-facto way of referring to non-gender-specific people.
My point was, and still is, that it is neither wrong nor sexist to use "he" or "his". Unless of course, the sentence you are writing is incorrect or sexist.
Two of your beliefs about English are demonstrably wrong, in a good way. First, singular "they" isn't a recent construct: it goes back at least to Chaucer and never fell out of use. Second, it has never been "an established point" of English grammar to use generic "he"; that one was a prescriptivist construct, introduced by grammarians in the 18th century, most prominently by an author (and entrepreneur!) named Ann Fisher as well as by the perhaps aptly named Sir Charles Coote.
The point is that singular "they" is actually more authentic and more historical English than generic "he" is. That's why I said you were wrong in a good way: there's no conflict at all between inclusive language and good English, and never has been. The language has had an answer for this all along; it was generic "he" that was the interloper, and this was at least partly for ideological reasons—the British parliament even passed a bill in 1850 mandating it! So the ideologues and outrage addicts have been at this for a long time. They just switched sides at some point.
It's an example of gender bias. By using exclusively he, there is an implicit assumption that whoever reading the doc block is a man, reinforcing the gender norm of programming being male dominated. I would say that falls under sexism.
I don't think sexism was intended, but that doesn't mean it can't be sexist. I'll be the first to admit it, I say sexist shit all the time, most of the time it's unintended. Fact of the matter is I'm constantly surrounded by sexism, I was raised on it, and it is what was taught to me. Even though I make a conscious effort to think outside the perspective of what I was taught, it's impossible not to internalize the sexism all around me.
Do you really think that it assumes the reader is male? Why not the caller? Can't the function written in the user's code be masculine, just like boats are feminine?
(This was largely intended as hyperbole, I don't know why "it" is not the answer. Distancing and dehumanizing language seems appropriate when talking about function calls.)
Reforming the use of English pronouns has nothing to do with the employee's professional activities.
No one should be threatened for either supporting or not supporting a political cause or brand of activism.
There is no consensus in society about how pronouns should be used or their cultural significance [1]. No one should have their livelihood threatened for either agreeing or not agreeing with one position or another or not having an opinion on the topic, or applying their professional, technical judgement.
Without commenting on the details of the kerfuffle, from a broader perspective, the workplace should not be a place for political coercion.
One editorial recently suggested that:
"[E]mployers coercing employees to express their employers’ political views is “the most undercovered story of the year.” [2]
"Already, American employers are increasingly using the captive audience technique to force their employees to learn about the employer’s political and religious views. During these sessions, employees may be forced, at the risk of losing their jobs, to listen to their employer’s perspective on the latest political and religious issues of the day." [3]
> No one should be threatened for either supporting or not supporting a political cause or brand of activism.
You should read before commenting: the problem wasn't his choice of wording but rather how he turned a trivial change into an argument and reverted another committer's action complete with a threat.
If he didn't want to get involved, simply ignoring it was by far the easiest course of action. Instead, he twice chose to escalate to an unnecessary level of confrontation.
"@isaacs may have his commit bit but that does not mean he is at liberty to land patches at will. All patches have to be signed off by either me or Bert. Isaac, consider yourself chided."
Why I rejected the pull request. Us maintainers tend to reject tiny doc changes because they're often more trouble than they're worth. You have to collect and check the CLA, it makes git blame less effective, etc.
That's why the usual approach to such pull requests is 'no, unless' - in this case the 'unless' should probably have applied. To me as a non-native speaker, the difference between 'him' and 'them' seems academic but hey, if it gets us scores of female contributors, who am I to object?
Why I reverted the commit. In hindsight, I should have given Isaac the benefit of the doubt because I don't doubt that he acted with the best of intentions. On the other hand, if another committer jumped the line like that, I would have done the same thing. We have procedures in place and no one is exempt from them.
To the people that felt it necessary to call me a misogynist: I volunteer in a mentorship program that gets young people - especially young women - involved in technology. How many of you go out and actively try to increase the number of women in the field?
I'm probably going to step back from libuv and node.js core development. I do it more out a sense of duty than anything else. If this is what I have to deal with, then I'd just as rather do something else. Hope that clears things up. Thanks."
Most of the new guidelines[1] are technical, but the one relevant the events of the last day or two is on line 78:
+* When documenting APIs and/or source code, don't make assumptions or make
+ implications about race, gender, religion, political orientation or anything
+ else that isn't relevant to the project.
I think it was pretty classy of Ben not to comment on some of the hateful comments in the commit that, instead of adding to discussion or trying to prevent future error, simply were personal attacks at him.
I can't say I'm surprised though. bnoordhuis lacks tact; poke other people enough and eventually you'll get an angry mob. The parent article talks about learning, but glosses over that bnoordhuis' behaviour that set this all off isn't unusual for him. Learning? No. Class? No.
That said, this is a tempest in a teacup. bnoordhuis upsets someone again, news at 11.
Uhm, Ben lacks tact? Says who? I think you guys are maybe confusing the tough Dutch culture as being insensitive to some hot issues. Ben is an extremely smart, extremely prolific programmer. When you're out and about like him you're bound to get yourself tripped somewhere along the way.
As an aside, while Joyent has exposed itself as being extremely unprofessional and prone to jumping on the gun, I'm saddened that Strongloop is quick to say things like "If Ben can’t learn, we’ll fire him" too ... and this is just after all of this happened. My goodness people, stop sitting on your high chairs and speculating firings, it's not a fucking game.
It's a general observation I've developed watching node development on occasion. I don't even follow it that closely, but a disproportionate amount of negativity seems to stem from bnoordhuis; that's why I remember him specifically.
Okay, it could be just me, but I've heard other people subsequently complain about his behaviour too.
I think you guys are maybe confusing the tough Dutch culture as being insensitive to some hot issues.
The Netherlands isn't the world, and only a tiny percentage of developers come from there. As the blog post says, bnoordhuis needs to learn, but so far he has not. Furthermore, regardless of the origins of his behaviour, it's still negative.
Way to go making a comment about a culture and tradition you are unfamiliar with based upon a newspaper article that doesn't go into the history behind said tradition!
Linus for example isn't the nicest guy in town either. I know a few devs who are parsecs ahead of me, in knowledge and/or productivity. None of them could qualify as a nice and polite person. May be observation bias, but I see a connection here.
I think that's an example of sample bias. There are many excellent developers who are nice too, you just don't hear as much about them because they're not causing drama. Again.
All the great developers I've worked with have been fantastic people too. Maybe I've just been lucky.
As a counterpoint in the node community: isaacs is pleasant, amazingly patient, and an excellent developer.
Having recently been considering Node for a major new project in my organization, I'm greatly encouraged to see that the folks in its developer community so thoroughly refuse to let themselves be distracted by irrelevancies from such a laserlike focus on improving their code.
Way to throw your people under the bus. I wouldn't work for a company like this -- not to mention Joyent, after that bit of libel they call a blog post.
Are these people illiterate? Are they not aware that in the English language masculine pronouns are correct for both gender-specific and gender-neutral uses? Mankind refers to everybody. It may seem awkward, particularly to over-literal types, but so is our spelling, grammar, and pronunciation generally.
> gender neutral, it's highly debatable whether he, him or his are also
Not in the English language. It's debated by some whether this might have a subliminal effect and reinforce social gender stereotypes (though no evidence for that hypothesis as far as I'm aware) and therefore whether masculine prepositions _should_ be treated as neutral but that's in the same category as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_spelling_reform.
There's nothing wrong with that of course and it can be an interesting hypothesis to pursue - but I find it depressing that a self-proclaimed educated and science-based open source tech community so easily engages on a witch hunt based on pure speculation.
Several centuries of linguistic evolution would disagree. Those have always been neutral, though there has been usage of singular "they" dating back to Shakespearean-era.
It is somewhat widely accepted that he/him/his is only gender-neutral in situations where the gender is ambiguous though. For example, in writing documentation.
Personally, I think it sounds weird and prefer they/one.
I love this post. I work with engineers on a daily basis and the one thing I find so foreign is an unhealthy attachment to perfection, as if such a thing existed. The easy thing to do is deride someone. The hard thing is to reach out. Nice article written in support of a hard working guy. Upvote.
As poorly as Joyent may have responded, and as badly they might have misunderstood this entire situation, I am convinced that everyone involved here (on both sides) had nothing but good intentions, and that until we acknowledge these things and make up, this is going to become needlessly harmful to the community at large.
Pause, reflect, forgive... nobody here is a monster.
I would dearly love to agree (see my other comments if you don't believe me).
But Bryan Cantrill's, and Joyent's behaviour seems very cynical, manipulative, and childish. He used deliberately inflammatory language, and would have, at the very least, been aware of the fact that it might not be so black and white. He will have known that he started a witch-hunt and did nothing, as far as I can tell, to try and quell it.
No-one is a monster, but some people are either playing games or have spectacularly poor judgment. Not the kind of company you want to work with either way.
Joyent has severely blotted its copy-book. For that reason if I'm ever in a position to make purchasing decisions I will exclude Joyent.
I agree - a classic case of hyper media attention boiling over into other, existing politics. God only knows what would have happened if he had rejected a commit involving the word 'religion'
It's not an "issue" so much as a pervasive problem. Presuming default-male is bad form, and it has a subtle excluding effect.
Replacing "him" with "the user" might seem inconsequential, but it's a tiny step in the right direction. A few million more like that and we'll be getting somewhere.
The original issue was a pull request[1] made to the libuv code base to change "him" to "them". It was rejected[2] by one of the committers, Ben Noordhuis, as being too trivial.
That decision was reversed by Isaac Schlueter (another committer) and committed[3]. Noordhuis reverted that commit[4], chiding Schlueter for not following procedure, but that revert was quickly reverted itself.
Bryan Cantrill of Joyent, one of the sponsors of the project and Schleuter's employer, wrote a blog post[5] indicating that had Noordhuis been a Joyent employee, he would've been fired. This post here is a response to that post. Strongloop is Noordhuis's employer.
Not exactly. There are two Isaacs. Isaac Roth at StrongLoop, author of the OP, he didn't come into the story until today. Isaac Schlueter works for Joyent, and originally committed the requested change.
Doesn't look like he did; they appear to be inferring it because he considered the one word change trivial. While I disagree with his call I can't believe how quickly this blew up into a PR storm.
I'm shocked that such an unprofessional blog post made it to the Joyent company blog. It's destroyed what respect I had for them.
I couldn't find any explicit statement by Noordhuis that could be characterized as what Cantrill called an "insistence that pronouns should in fact be gendered". I took that to be something Cantrill thought was implied by the revert.
However, there's a deleted GitHub comment from Noordhuis that nevertheless still appears on his public activity stream[1]. I starts with:
> For the record, I reverted the merge in 804d40e. Isaac may be a committer but that does not mean he is free to land patches at will. Patches have t…
Ultimately, it looks like Ben was fairly impartial about the whole thing - he didn't accept it because it wasn't a significant enough change to merit accepting. He tried to revert the acceptance because the acceptance had been done without approval.
Politically, reverting Isaac's commit (and especially doing so with a passive aggressive "Isaac, consider yourself chided." commit message) was clearly a mistake.
A mistake, but only in context of the larger issue. In the context of a reverted commit, it was a fairly laid-back way of saying "you shouldn't have done this direct merge and you probably knew better".
It's actually the other way around, the objection to the use of singular 'them/they' as a gender indeterminate pronoun is a relatively recent shift apparently originating from American English. It is a form which was otherwise well-established:
Ah, I wasn't meaning to tell you what the usage is in your country, just trying to make the narrow point about American English.
As an aside, do you mind if I ask, is there a narrative in India about protecting the Indian dialect of English, like you might get in Britain about vulgur Americanization, or in America about pretentious Britishisms?
Those two may not seem like much (at least I don't think so), but this kind of passive-aggressive behaviour isn't atypical for bnoordhuis. Eventually it'll cause a bad backlash. Like this.
bnoordhuis is an example of a problem that many popular OSS projects will face in their lifetime: is keeping a highly-productive jerk around worth it? On the one hand they produce good code, but on the other they help drag the community's ethos into the tank.
I just see a guy following policy, and then reverting the patch when that policy was broken.
Also, I don't know if it's very smart calling somebody a jerk whom you've never met, or had any significant dealings with.
It's very easy to do it from the comfort of your couch at home, but I suspect it'd be a different story if they were right in front of you.
In fact, it's basically bullying.
This is the sort of thing you get from reading tabloids or gossip mags - "OMG, Kim Kardashian is like, such a <xyz>, because I read that, like, <xyz> said <xyz> to <xyz>. She is like, a total <xyz>! I mean, if I were her, I'd <xyz>".
Seriously, I would have thought that HN as a community is better than that.
> But if he can, we’ll get Node v0.12 delivered a lot faster and have a stronger community.
And of course, Strongloop could not help but make another half way claim that they are the ones "in charge" of node. This current stuff aside, I just cannot believe their lack of shame when trying to take commercial credit for a community project.
It is interesting following this particular discussion about gender pronouns in Node.js. I am curious how other, more mature, products have handled similar. GitHub and easily viewed pull requests make some of this much more visible than say in the old days of sites like sourceforge.
That is good of you. No more questions. Generally I agree with your assessment, however when confronting systemic biases sometimes it's necessary to speak out publicly. However, that can be done outside the context of a particular person-to-person encounter.
> But while Isaac is a Joyent employee, Ben is not—and if he had been, he wouldn't be as of this morning: to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent.
For comparison, here is bnoordhuis's comment from the pull request thread [2] that the post is referencing:
> Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that.
Honestly, Joyent's post strikes me as a horrible overreaction and attempt at character assassination over what should have been a small matter. Rejecting pull requests that only correct typos or comments has been standard practice for the Node.js project for a long time now--this isn't the first one to be closed for being too small of a change, a fact that Joyent, as the main driver of the project, should be aware of.
bnoordhuis followed standard procedure, yet Joyent tries to cast him as being intentionally sexist and a terrible person. Seeing such immature behavior coming from their corporate blog--calling him an "asshole", saying he should be fired, insinuating that they wish they could kick him out of the project--has pretty much destroyed the respect I had for the company.
[1] https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun
[2] https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015