I can't help but wonder how much of this is a power struggle between Strongloop and Joyent.
I'd probably reject this too from a do-gooder searching github for pronouns to change.
"Get another hobby. Rejected."
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?
I don't like the idea of someone poking around to make 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.
Whether this is actually what happened, or is even a bad thing is up to debate.
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.
For known contributors, yeah, it's a nice feature.
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).
In English the neuter pronoun is identical to the masculine. "to stop him" doesn't assume that he is male nor female it is agnostic on this point. Unless there is some other indication of the sex of the subject being referred to then you can't necessarily tell. Of course the reason for the use of the masculine pronoun as the neuter is probably historically based in language education being mainly provided to men, but that doesn't mean it needs to be "corrected".
Excepting that point I think I'd agree with what you said.
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?
I don't get it. Node is an open-source project that accepts unsolicited input in general...is there some objection to "doing good"?
So basically I was trying to sidestep the strawman argument.
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.
"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.