[ubernostrum]

And definitions can change.

As, in fact, they have. "They" was the gender-neutral singular pronoun in English for a long, long time. The idea of "he" as the "neutral" pronoun was forced onto the language only within the last couple of centuries. And now "they" can be, and is being, forced back.

[randomdata]

> And definitions can change.

Exactly. English is fluid and you can correctly use any word you want, as long as the message is accurately conveyed. And in this case it provably was, as the person I replied to specifically recognized that the original commenter was referring to Julia Evans when using he. So what is the issue here?

[ubernostrum]

The issue is the original commenter did not use "he" in the sense of "a person of indeterminate or unknown gender". The original commenter very clearly used "he" in the sense of "I assume all authors of programming-related articles on HN are male".

Attempting to retrofit a "well it's OK to use it gender-neutral" explanation onto that doesn't work. And trying to enforce a gender-neutral "he" is hopefully going to stop working in the near future.

[randomdata]

That seems like a pretty big leap. The original commenter left one short sentence. There is not enough information to conclude anything about intent. The context of the comment does not rely on gender at all. In fact, I see nothing in the article to suggest the person's gender in the first place. The only hint I can find on the whole page of the person's gender is the name "Julia" in the header, which, not personally knowing this person, could just as easily be a man's name as a woman's. It is reasonable to stick to generally accepted gender neutral terms, like "he" or "they", here.

Although, for what it is worth, even if this person is a man, I see no harm in using "she" as well. It's just plain not pertinent information to get the proper gender here. The message that it is referring to the original author would still be conveyed, and that is the only thing that really matters. English really doesn't care about anything else.

[ubernostrum]

It's not a big leap, and no amount of faux-innocent obtuseness will make it be one.

Also I am unaware of any culture in which "Julia" is in common usage as a masculine personal name. Being a modern Romance-language version of a Latin-derived name, the "a" ending gives it away quite plainly ("Julio" would be the masculine, or "Julius" in the original).

[randomdata]

> Also I am unaware of any culture in which "Julia" is in common usage as a masculine personal name.

However, it is very common to use "he" in a gender neutral way. So common, in fact, that the modern dictionary includes gender neutral definitions for the word. If we cannot make assumptions about the usage of common words defined by the dictionary, how can we begin to do the same for names of people? Julia, even if always assigned to females, may simply be a name given at birth that does not represent this person's current gender.