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Comment by rpedela | Hacker News Reader

I think the article is missing a lot of context. What was the offending issue?

The original issue was a pull request[1] made to the libuv code base to change "him" to "them". It was rejected[2] by one of the committers, Ben Noordhuis, as being too trivial.

That decision was reversed by Isaac Schlueter (another committer) and committed[3]. Noordhuis reverted that commit[4], chiding Schlueter for not following procedure, but that revert was quickly reverted itself.

Bryan Cantrill of Joyent, one of the sponsors of the project and Schleuter's employer, wrote a blog post[5] indicating that had Noordhuis been a Joyent employee, he would've been fired. This post here is a response to that post. Strongloop is Noordhuis's employer.

[1]: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015

[2]: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538...

[3]: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/47d98b64c45db8335bf7e...

[4]: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...

[5]: http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun

Not exactly. There are two Isaacs. Isaac Roth at StrongLoop, author of the OP, he didn't come into the story until today. Isaac Schlueter works for Joyent, and originally committed the requested change.

Yeah, sorry about that; I just caught that mistake myself. Fixed.

Roth is actually Issac, not Isaac.

Duly noted. Thanks.

Much ado over nothing. "Them" in that context just sounds odd to me (perhaps not in American English?) A 50/50 mix of him/her sounds way more natural.

Not all people belong to the categories "Male" and "Female".

Luckily you won't be fired for this post, but be warned for the future.

I'm all for diversity, but I like my pronouns as they are, thank you.

It's actually the other way around, the objection to the use of singular 'them/they' as a gender indeterminate pronoun is a relatively recent shift apparently originating from American English. It is a form which was otherwise well-established:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Generic_they

(There are example quotes in the link from Shakespeare, Austen, Twain, and Bernard-Shaw)

I was comparing against Indian English, but point noted.

Ah, I wasn't meaning to tell you what the usage is in your country, just trying to make the narrow point about American English.

As an aside, do you mind if I ask, is there a narrative in India about protecting the Indian dialect of English, like you might get in Britain about vulgur Americanization, or in America about pretentious Britishisms?

No there isn't a 'protect Indian English' narrative here.

When did Ben say pronouns should be gendered? I saw nothing on GitHub like that, yet the Joyent post mentions it more than once.

I couldn't find any explicit statement by Noordhuis that could be characterized as what Cantrill called an "insistence that pronouns should in fact be gendered". I took that to be something Cantrill thought was implied by the revert.

However, there's a deleted GitHub comment from Noordhuis that nevertheless still appears on his public activity stream[1]. I starts with:

> For the record, I reverted the merge in 804d40e. Isaac may be a committer but that does not mean he is free to land patches at will. Patches have t…

Perhaps it was stated there?

[1]: https://github.com/bnoordhuis?tab=activity

Seems not: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...

Ultimately, it looks like Ben was fairly impartial about the whole thing - he didn't accept it because it wasn't a significant enough change to merit accepting. He tried to revert the acceptance because the acceptance had been done without approval.

Technically, he was in the right.

Politically, reverting Isaac's commit (and especially doing so with a passive aggressive "Isaac, consider yourself chided." commit message) was clearly a mistake.

A mistake, but only in context of the larger issue. In the context of a reverted commit, it was a fairly laid-back way of saying "you shouldn't have done this direct merge and you probably knew better".

Doesn't look like he did; they appear to be inferring it because he considered the one word change trivial. While I disagree with his call I can't believe how quickly this blew up into a PR storm.

I'm shocked that such an unprofessional blog post made it to the Joyent company blog. It's destroyed what respect I had for them.

At a guess: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538... and https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...

Those two may not seem like much (at least I don't think so), but this kind of passive-aggressive behaviour isn't atypical for bnoordhuis. Eventually it'll cause a bad backlash. Like this.

bnoordhuis is an example of a problem that many popular OSS projects will face in their lifetime: is keeping a highly-productive jerk around worth it? On the one hand they produce good code, but on the other they help drag the community's ethos into the tank.

I just see a guy following policy, and then reverting the patch when that policy was broken.

Also, I don't know if it's very smart calling somebody a jerk whom you've never met, or had any significant dealings with.

It's very easy to do it from the comfort of your couch at home, but I suspect it'd be a different story if they were right in front of you.

In fact, it's basically bullying.

This is the sort of thing you get from reading tabloids or gossip mags - "OMG, Kim Kardashian is like, such a <xyz>, because I read that, like, <xyz> said <xyz> to <xyz>. She is like, a total <xyz>! I mean, if I were her, I'd <xyz>".

Seriously, I would have thought that HN as a community is better than that.

You're making a lot of assumptions there.

Here is the context: Joyent VP of Eng calls Node.js leading contributor an asshole on the corporate blog. http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun

Real classy.

Yes the guy was being thick, but he was virtually fired by someone not at his own company.

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