[eldude]

This is a really entertaining writing style: technical enlightenment through demonstration via humorous examples. For the lazy (and additional humorous demonstration), I wish he'd provided an example gif showing it in action (i.e., Github, terminal, Sourcetree, etc...).

[JoshM33k]

(The terminal would be the only place it would display correctly it seems, but it would be nice to see the chaos it may or may not cause in Github and other tools.)

Finding someone who can write very technically while also being funny and charismatic is pretty rare (We computer types aren't always the biggest hits at parties). I also really appreciate his "last time on" opening paragraphs... it gives some context to the blog post and where's coming from in his headspace. Neat.

[sbierwagen]

The author uses female pronouns.

[eldude]

There are no gendered pronouns in her blog post.[1]

At first, I was surprised to find I falsely assumed she was male in spite of evidence to the contrary, and was going to thank you for making me more aware of my own oversight. Upon review, however, I made the correct assumption that it was non-gendered. I'll forego the inciting comment, and corresponding cultural political flamewar over my use of a singular default male pronoun. If you down-voted me, please understand that doing so is alienating and a disservice to conversations. We should not punish commenters for failing to conform to our own personal cultural norms. This is consistent with the spirit of your comment; engineers need not conform to external expectations of a masculine identity.

[1] Her handles at the bottom are neither pronouns, nor in the blog post, and were inconsequential to me given my present lack of motive for reaching out to the author.

[sbierwagen]

I didn't downvote you. (Downvotes are heavily rate-limited, at a guess, from very unscientific observation, I think I only get ten a day, so I save them for the really annoying comments.)

I'm not sure why you think he/his pronouns are nongendered. The nongendered pronouns in English are they/them.

[eldude]

You're continuing to controversialize and divert from the original conversation. That said...

> I think I only get ten [downvotes] a day, so I save them for the really annoying comments.

10 downvotes a day? Please reconsider your behavior. You are almost certainly unnecessarily alienating commenters, and in this case, misguidedly so.

> I'm not sure why you think he/his pronouns are nongendered.

When I said "it was non-gendered," I was referring to the blog post, which meant your original comment, "The author uses female pronouns," is factually incorrect.

> The nongendered pronouns in English are they/them.

I'm aware, and intimated as much: "I'll forego [discussing] my use of a singular default male pronoun". Yes, they/them is non-gendered, but it is also plural, making it grammatically historically incorrect. However, despite the informality of my comment, given the extreme propensity of the "generic he" to be controversialized, especially in technology and the internet, and the movement away from it during my lifetime, I'll placate to avoid the negative insinuations.

Educating yourself on the context of the matter would go a long way to ameliorate your sanctimonious attitude, and hopefully disincline you to feel the need to controversialize, divert and detract from conversations in the future.

[tangent128]

On the matter of education, singular they is historically supported: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Older_usage_by_r...

[eldude]

Yes. I'm aware. I was trying to be as terse as possible on the diverting topic. It's disputed whether past singular they was considered grammatically correct at the time, despite the source. Of course, then you have to define what it means to be "considered grammatically correct" and who decides that and now you're entering a whole subjective can of worms that turns into circular logic, leading back to the realization that language is largely cultural and expressive, not technical, unfortunately. All of these are reasons why there's not much room for a logical argument here, and only an appeal to emotion, bandwagoning, and some historical bad actors making the "generic he" untenable.

Still, the OC was factually incorrect and this entire topic is diverting and as you've now contributed to with your sanctimonious desire to prove me wrong, controversialized and alienating here on HN.

[dragonwriter]

they/them are non-gendered by the older (grammatical) meaning of "gender".

he/his and they/them both have well-established non-gender-specific meanings in the more recent (social) meaning of "gender" (prior to that fairly recent linguistic evolution, words had gender and people had sex -- while its useful to have a term for the distinct feature of people referred to by "gender" as distinct from "sex", its a very different thing than grammatical "gender", and grammatical gender doesn't have a 1:1 mapping to linguistic constructs whose semantics refer to social gender), though he/his also has a gender-specific meaning (and there is considerable potential for ambiguity between the gender-neutral and gender-specific senses of he/his.)