[karmel]

As a female software engineer, I haven't historically found "he" to be a huge barrier-- the bigger barrier is too few comments to begin with :) I would generally prefer any comments, gendered or not, but, all else being equal, it seems like we may as well un-gender them. I think here of Geena Davis's comments about the movie industry (loosely paraphrased): When people complain about the lack of realism in showing big company boards as full of women and people of color, she said, why shouldn't we? Movies are the one place we can say, "Poof! Everything is magically evenly distributed!" and maybe in doing so encourage more women and people of color to dream of being board members and the like. Similarly, in comments, we can magically make things more equitable with almost no investment, and if that helps traditional outsiders even a little, then, great!

[ralfd]

It is just polite for text referring to users or ones colleagues. But I find this new ungendered language in its consequence a bit bland/unpersonal though? Googles guide recommends A and B as names in new documentation, instead of using the traditional Alice and Bob, which I find less readable and makes me think of a dystopian future were people don't have names anymore.

And while scrubbing "sister class" from comments (or replacing it with "sibling") is not a big deal, it kind of lacks a certain human charm?

[karmel]

"The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit." - Stravinsky, who was apparently gender-neutral before it was cool. Use it as a challenge to come up with creative, human comments that don't rely on gender to be charming :)