[herghost]

"I changed it to male" - OMG YOU THINK WOMEN CAN'T CODE

"I changed it to female" - OMG YOU THINK WOMEN ARE BAD AT CODING

[svs]

Thanks for that. To all female programmers - I meant no offense.

On a related note, when are we getting genderless pronouns for English?

[phorese]

------------------------------------------------------

  Did I ever tell you that Programmer McCave
  Had twenty-three variables and named them all `a`
   
  Well, the programmer did. And that wasn't a smart thing to do.
  You see, when the programmer wants to add `a` to 2
   
  The programmer doesn't get a number oh no no no
  All twenty-three `a`s cause a buffer overflow
   
  This makes things quite difficult at the McCaves'
  As you can imagine, with so many `a`s.
   
  And often the programmer wishes that, while coding,
  The programmer hadn't ignored that sense of foreboding
   
  And called one of them runCount, And one of them lastNum
  And one of them allSales and another roundSum
   
  And one of them lastId, and another userNames
  And one subnetMask, or numStartedGames
   
  Any old names would actually do
  even if they were just `bar` or `foo`
   
  And adding hyphens or humble underscores
  The programmer could have come up with so many more!
   
  Like read_app_config_from_this_file_name
  But no, the programmer went and called them all the same
   
  If only the programmer hadn't given into the hype
  And used a language strongly typed
   
  The programmer would have avoided this horrible fate
  But didn't and so now it's too late. 

------------------------------------------------------

There, FTFY. People will still think the programmer is a male, but now it's their own damn bias at fault :)

[thret]

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-she1.htm

'he' was already genderless. 'She' was introduced to signify female, and 'he' become masculine by comparison. Perhaps in introducing 'she' we should have introduced something like 'ghe' for male, then we could keep 'he' as undefined, and everyone would be happy.

[philh]

That's not quite what it says. It says that there was a time (1200 years ago, in a different language) when he existed with heo, which was female; and then heo morphed to he; and then she was introduced. It doesn't specify whether he was originally masculine or ambiguous.

[thret]

Yes, but it does specify that 'he' was used for both male and female at the time 'she' was introduced in Middle English.

[herghost]

I wouldn't sweat it. Anyone offended at this needs to recalibrate their outrage-o-meter.

[adwf]

Can't say this enough. Someone tries to make a funny little poem about variable naming and someone else tries to derail it into a debate about gender. Skewed priorities there I think!

[aagdbl]

"It"? For programmers you could also use "id".

[philh]

> On a related note, when are we getting genderless pronouns for English?

When enough people start using them despite occasionally annoying other people. :)

(I'm a fan of ve/ver/vis for someone of unknown/nonbinary gender, but in a case like this I would have just picked he or she and to hell with anyone who complains.)

[juliangregorian]

In concept it's great, the problem is that when one says e.g. "ve had 23 variables" I for one tend to read it as a bad German/Russian impression.

[octo_t]

they. Its grammatically and syntactically valid.

"Where's Mark.... Oh there they are"