[wcummings]

Ben Noordhuis, the center of the Node.js pronoun scandal [1] and one of the founders of Strongloop, has activity in IO.js more recent than his activity in Node.js.

I can't help but wonder how much of this is a power struggle between Strongloop and Joyent.

https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun

[SloopJon]

Off topic, I guess, but color me unimpressed by the guy claiming he would fire someone for rejecting a pull request that does nothing but advance a political agenda.

[buckbova]

Yeah, talk about an over the top reaction.

I'd probably reject this too from a do-gooder searching github for pronouns to change.

"Get another hobby. Rejected."

[oddevan]

Out of curiosity, what's the harm in accepting the pull request after someone's already done the work?

Edit: I get not wanting unsolicited input from "do-gooders," but if someone on the project made such a change, would you still reject it?

[jamon51]

@buckbova, what's wrong with one-word changes? I run a semi-popular OS project and accept them all the time. It makes the newbs feel good and encourages them to explore further into the source code.

[buckbova]

If I were in this position, I would accept it from a frequent contributor to the project.

I don't like the idea of someone poking around to make one-word non-functional changes.

[kordless]

> one-word non-functional changes

What about typos in docs? Contextually it seems reasonable to accept changes of a single word which may cause confusion on operational grounds.

Is a gendered word really different? Operationally, it would appear differentiating between pronouns might be required in documentation if some readers of the docs are offended by the masculine use. One could certainly argue that with excessive profanity.

I would note here that I probably wouldn't care if someone put 'she' in a document to represent a user entity, but that's a simply an observation of my own biases, not a rational to ignore another's.

[wcummings]

The parent is implying that someone was going out of there way to find pronoun errors, to make a political issue of it, not out of genuine interest in project.

Whether this is actually what happened, or is even a bad thing is up to debate.

[benatkin]

> What about typos in docs?

In my opinion these trivial changes should be submitted as text in a bug report rather than patches or pull requests. For brevity a regex statement like s/foo/baz/ can be used.

[Dewie]

> Is a gendered word really different?

Yes. A typo is objectively wrong (as objectively as you can be in such matters, anyway). Gendered words is a matter of style. One style is to only masculine pronouns, another to only use feminine, to mix them, to avoid them altogether... and it's not clear which are better. Avoiding gendered pronouns altogether might be easier on the eyes for some people, for other people it seems confusing (singular they, what?), for others it is simply grating and hard to read, etc. Similar trade offs for the other options, of course.

We might as well have people who object to words that they interpret as being offensive, like using the word "right" to indicate "correct" or "good". They might feel that it is biased towards right handed people, and that argument seems to actually have some linguistic precedent - even other than English, "right" in some Germanic languages is also a synonym for "higher", another word with "good" connotations. Even beyond this far-fetched scenario, consider all words that could be argued to have a sexist background. Do we ban all of them, or do we just accept that although they have a nasty history, that history does not necessarily translate to how we intend to use them in this day and age?

I also remember some troll on GitHub that started to complain to a lot of repositories - after the Node.js controversy - that their documentation was being sexist. And many of the owners fell straight for it, because apparently it was a well executed troll, and/or they didn't want to risk being dismissive (because, you know, that could end badly for them).

[snowwrestler]

> I get not wanting unsolicited input from "do-gooders,"

I don't get it. Node is an open-source project that accepts unsolicited input in general...is there some objection to "doing good"?

[oddevan]

That's fair. By "do-gooders" I was referring to rude people that make it their business to point out all of your problems. Their motivation is not to "do good," it's to be right, and I totally understand not wanting to accept unsolicited input from them because, well, they're rude. :)

So basically I was trying to sidestep the strawman argument.

[hartator]

Actually, it was also some red-tape as the contributor was new, he has to sign some documents and be on the CLA.

Source: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015

[jamon51]

Makes sense. For the record, I don't know much about the issue at hand, was specifically talking about one-word contributions (which I encourage on my project).

[benihana]

I think it's less harm and more about principle. Nodejs is presumably maintained by hardworking people who devote their time to making it as good as they can. Presumably there's a bug tracker and they'd love contributions, and presumably this issue wasn't on their tracker (otherwise it would have been accepted outright without any issue).

I can understand the frustration of someone coming into a project and saying "I've made this change that no one on this project asked for cause the words used were offending me." It seems disrespectful to the hard work everyone is doing to keep the project up and running.

I think people would be a lot more open to things like this if there was some proof that removing gendered pronouns actually did something. It's claimed to make open source less hostile for women. Is there any proof that it's working?

[tootie]

He didn't just reject it, he tried to undo it after it was accepted by someone else.

[spb]

He didn't just try to undo it, he `git push -f`'d over it.

[jessaustin]

Well that is a different thing. At that point he couldn't claim that it was about saving his energies for more "worthwhile" project goals.

[snowwrestler]

Color me impressed, because the political agenda that's being advanced is gender equality in technology, which to me seems pretty worthy.

[jbigelow76]

Problem with that situation was that the Joyent guy was commenting on Noordhuis, an employee of a direct competitor to Joyent. So to many it came off as political opportunism to screw with Strongloop and not a sincere evaluation of the situation.

[danellis]

I haven't seen the commit in question, but it seems like there's a balancing act here between gender neutrality and avoiding awkward phrasing. It's just an unfortunate fact of English that being gender neutral all the time leads to awkward prose. Sometimes readability wins.

[drderidder]

It isn't that. Really it's Fedor and Mikeal pushing it a lot, not the strongloop guys. The other core devs are behind it, too, except a couple from Joyent. It really has nothing to do with corporate power struggles (that's more what Joyent's advisory board is about, frankly)... it has to do with developers getting really frustrated at the stalled pace of development on the Joyent branch. The real objective is to get rapid release cycles, pull in updates on V8, better separation of core modules, and new features for better numerical computing, etc. Oh, and new logo proposals are going wild at the moment.

[craigyk]

New features for numerical computing? I am intrigued... for me that essentially means operator overloading, including []. I think that would open the door for implementing a numpy like module for Node. Is that the plan?

[drderidder]

No, operator overloading isn't in the language spec, with reason. I think numerical computing libs like LAPACK, if ported to JS, will probably require a wrapper around 64-bit floats (a la BigDecimal) and math operators that are really function calls. The plan has been to look into transpiling from fortran to asm.js although my personal feeling is it would be better just to use the C API and compile a module that statically links in the necessary libs. They'll figure it out...

[petercooper]

Strongloop has this statement: http://strongloop.com/strongblog/position-on-io-js/

[dmpk2k]

Reminds me of the Docker/Rocket situation, at least in the monetary sense. Node.js became big, money went to heads, and here we are.

[tracker1]

I don't feel that's the case at all... relative to development of every stable release of Node, 0.10 is getting very long in the tooth, and 0.11 is pretty stagnant as well. If only from the perspective of v8 supported features alone. At this point we really should be working on 0.13 (towards 1.0) which should have the --harmony features by default.

It's bad enough that I have to use browserify to get working features in the browsers... I shouldn't have to do that for a leading edge server-side JS platform in the development version. Don't get me wrong, still love node, and JS is very effective, just the same, I'd rather not have to require in libraries that should be baked into the engine at this point... or writing shims to make for an easier transition.

co/koa are over a year old now... developed against features that still aren't in the supported release... prior to 0.10, v8 had been kept very close to the edge... it's now over a year behind.

[uptownJimmy]

What part of

"it has to do with developers getting really frustrated at the stalled pace of development on the Joyent branch"

is so hard to understand? Cuz this gets incessantly repeated in a calm, rational manner by people involved with the branch.