Comment by ayhanfuat

2 years ago

There was a big fight on Twitter last month because of a comment he made 3 years ago (https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814). I think that's closely related.

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ayhanfuat

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commodoreboxer  2 years ago

How is that related? What does it have to do with Rust? If anything, I'd say it shows that social media (and microblogging platforms like Twitter and Mastodon in particular) tend to be politically charged, toxic, and dogmatic.

  • irusensei  2 years ago

    I can totally imagine someone from the Ladybird project reaching out for the Rust community channels and being harassed because of that silly PR.

  • LoganDark  2 years ago

    I think it has nothing to do with Rust; probably someone first found it who just so happened to be part of the Rust community, and since the Rust community is full of 'the type of person who would be offended by such an interaction' (basically any queer person) there was naturally an explosion about it.

Spivak  2 years ago

This is such a weird thread, sure it's a nit but grammatically a person of unknown sex should be either "he or she" or "they." And the latter is by far the preferred form by English writers regardless of political affiliation. It didn't become a political thing until Andreas made it political.

It would have taken two seconds to be like "+1 Good catch man, merged."

  • skipkey  2 years ago

    It could be an age thing. When I was taught grammar 40 plus years ago, for someone of indeterminate sex, “he” was taught as always appropriate, “he or she” was a somewhat clunky alternative that was situationally appropriate where you were stressing the gender neutrality, and “they” was just simply bad grammar which would get you bad marks. I’m honestly not sure when that changed.

    • freedomben  2 years ago

      Indeed. I was taught very directly that the singular pronouns were he, she, and it. The plurals were we, you, they. So grammatically if you were referring to a singular person of unknown sex, then you should use "it" .

      Obviously using the pronoun "it" at some point became offensive, so is highly not recommended. But, (probably after having drilled into my head repeatedly that "they" is a plural) it seems very incorrect to my ears when "they" is used to describe a singular person. It also unfortunately comes with ambiguity sometimes. I've had misunderstandings where I used they as a singular pronoun to describe someone of unknown gender, and the person I was talking to took it as a reference to a plural, which at best creates confusion, at worst misleads.

      Language is an incredibly hard problem, and it certainly doesn't help that as youth, we are drilled with supposedly objective truth regarding language, when in reality it is far less defined and more nebulous than than the teachers would have us believe. The generational gaps can already be tricky to navigate. Having different ideas of objective truth, especially regarding language, certainly does not help.

    • littlestymaar  2 years ago

      “They” is particularly convenient when discussing about people over the internet, because not only we don't have to assume the person's gender, but we don't have to assume if it's an individual or a group either.

      And tbh using gender in pronouns is artificially annoying, and it's good to see English has a way out of it, like it got rid of giving genders to common objects like most European languages (“Non, it's La chaise, chair is feminine in French” -_-').

      5 replies →

bobbyskelton41  2 years ago

Seeing this right now single-handedly turned me off from the project. Of all the possible (and more plausible) conclusions that the maintainer could have had, they deduced it to be political (which is arguable) and immediately became extremely defensive. Apparently women don't exist. It's an absolute failure of one's responsibilities as a maintainer -- arguably as a person -- to treat someone's goodwill with such disregard.