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From: Alan Bawden <alan@csail.mit.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell,comp.unix.programmer,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Command Languages Versus Programming Languages
Date: Sun, 07 Apr 2024 06:04:16 -0400
Organization: ITS Preservation Society
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Muttley@dastardlyhq.com writes:

   On Fri, 05 Apr 2024 19:35:37 -0400
   Alan Bawden <alan@csail.mit.edu> wrote:
   ...
   >I.e., she would allow herself to use spaces and newlines, and just

   ITYM "he" would allow HIMself.

My practice when I am writing and I need a generic pronoun is to flip a
coin to decide whether I am going to use "she" or "he".  On this
occasion the coin determined that I was going to write "she".

I started doing this many years ago after some author, in his book's
introduction, offered as a defense of using exclusively male pronouns in
the rest of his book the fact that he had just used female pronouns in
the previous paragraph, and "the reader will have found this jarring".
Well I hadn't actually noticed that he had done that, and I had to go
back and check to be sure he had.

The book in question was a couple decades old at that time, so I took my
failure to notice what the author thought I would find jarring as
evidence that the language had evolved to the point where a occasional
generic "she" would not offend a reasonable reader.  So for years I've
used "she" about 50% of the time, and nobody has _ever_ objected.

Until today...

   Lets give the woke BS a miss, 95% of developers are men. It doesn't
   give you any brownie points, just makes you look a try-hard ass.

It doesn't matter to me what percentage of developers are male.  As long
as there are _some_ female developers, it is possible that the developer
in a hypothetical situation might be female, so it seems fair to
occasionally use "she".

If acknowledging the existence of female developers makes you
uncomfortable, you're just going to have to learn to deal with that
yourself.  I'm not going to adjust my language to cater to your
insecurities.

- Alan