I understand how this sort of off-topic snag can feel provocative, but please don't copy it into the thread where it can turn into an entire flamewar. There's nothing new in any of this at this point, and therefore nothing interesting. When there's nothing interesting, discussions turn nasty. Solution: focus on the interesting specific information and diffs in a post, and ignore the provocative bits.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The first time I saw this (using female pronouns for an unidentified person instead of "him/her" or "they") was in RMS's writings. So instead of using the indefinite/singular they, RMS would just say she/her. I thought it was an interesting way to hack language to break assumptions we have about gender, especially in technology.

It seems like "they're" would've been a better choice there, as there are a plurality of attackers in the world.

"Mallory" is commonly understood to be a woman's name. Come to think of it, so is "Trudy".

It's interesting to see the various reactions to a perfectly innocent idiom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob#Cast_of_characte...

Probably trying to diversify pronoun usage. Would we be pointing this out if they said 'he'?

Why not? Why assume that they are male?

To preempt criticism.