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Ben Noordhuis's Departure

blog.nodejs.org

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Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#111

Post by waterlion »

mseepgood wrote: post #14
selmnoo wrote: post #7

For those who don't know what's going on: Joyent made a blogpost calling Ben, (one of _THE_ most prolific contributors to nodjs), an asshole ( http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun ) and said they'd fire him if he'd been working for them, because he refused to take a commit making language in some part of the code gender-neutral. Here's Ben's last response to the whole ordeal: https://github.com/joyent/li…

> because he refused to take a commit making language in some part of the code gender-neutral He didn't only refuse such a commit. He actively reverted it.

Can you explain why you are ignoring the fact that he was following the procedure (i.e. had no choice, the committer wasn't in the Committers file) and clearly didn't realise that the commit had been accepted by someone else?

So many people seem to be wilfully ignoring the facts and I can't understand why.

Can you explain?

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#112

Post by malandrew »

Joyent,

Please do the classy thing and have Isaac create a NodeJS organization on Github and move the project to that organization under his stewardship.

With great power came great responsibility and using the Joyent corporate blog to excoriate one of the community's most valuable contributors is the path to the dark side.

http://substack.net/images/coronation.png

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#113

Post by chc »

xs_kid wrote: post #23
selmnoo wrote: post #7

For those who don't know what's going on: Joyent made a blogpost calling Ben, (one of _THE_ most prolific contributors to nodjs), an asshole ( http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun ) and said they'd fire him if he'd been working for them, because he refused to take a commit making language in some part of the code gender-neutral. Here's Ben's last response to the whole ordeal: https://github.com/joyent/li…

That was Joyent defending their control over to project, remember that Ben & StrongLoop were a menace for Joyent: http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/18/can-this-startup-steal-nod...

I think that's attributing malice where a simpler explanation is available. You would be amazed how often people misunderstand the relationships between organizations. People blame Apple for poorly designed Mac and iPhone apps. People blame Google for problems with websites. People blame independent website operators for Google ranking algorithm changes. People will call up and chew out the receptionist at a newspaper for positions taken by its competitor.

It is entirely possible that Joyent was getting a lot of blowback along the lines of "Do you guys really have a guy trying to keep gender-neutral language out of this project you control?" from people who didn't understand that Ben was not a Joyent employee, and thus Joyent felt pressured to publicly distance itself.

The way Joyent did this came across as pretty tasteless, but the idea that it was purely political seems to assume more than is really necessary to explain what we've seen. It seems more likely to me that they just wanted to make themselves look good by setting up Ben as the enemy and they did it in a rather ham-fisted way.

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#114

Post by wpietri »

abcd_f wrote: post #81
jonpaul wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're forgetting two key points: 1) Ben is not a native English speaker, so as stated by Ben, he didn't realize it was a big deal. 2) The committer didn't sign a CLA yet.

> Ben is not a native English speaker, so as stated by Ben, he didn't realize it was a big deal. But is it an actually big deal for native speakers? I realize that some people think it's important, but then some people also think that you can't swear in comments and can't use "retard" as a summary opinion about someone else. In live, non-corporate language would any native speaker in fact routinely use "they" instead…

I routinely use singular they [1] when referring to someone where gender isn't relevant. E.g., "I want to find a new doctor; they should be smarter than the fool I'm using now."

What got me going on this was Douglas Hofstadter's "A Person Paper on the Purity of Language" [2], which I read long ago in college. For me it's been a very gradual change; I don't like language forcing me in directions I don't want. Similarly, I've experimented with E-Prime [3] over the years.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

[2] http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#115

Post by lolwutf »

To everyone who felt polarized by this issue, I want you to take a second and feel shame.

This was such of little consequence, honestly. This wasn't some massive, elaborately planned, misogynistic plot. This was a matter of few pronouns in a random software project.

Stupid crusades like this do damage. We all need to pick our battles carefully. And not doing as much should collectively be viewed as a bad thing.

If you were mounting up on a crusade about this little issue, let me be clear: you should feel bad.

I love tech's progressive thoughts on individual rights and respect and firm adherence to equality, but sometimes the tech industry loses sight of the forest for the trees, and we should collectively rally against that habit.

Now, we lost an amazing Node contributor.

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#116

Post by DanBC »

rosser wrote: post #26
Zikes wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Semantics. It's the same as saying "no", and then saying "no" again. Really, if there's one thing I thought feminists had taken to heart it's "no means no".

if there's one thing I thought feminists had taken to heart it's "no means no". I'm a dude, and this comment seriously offends me. I'm sure you thought you were being funny or something, but I dare you to make that kind of quip to a woman's face, and see if you don't begin realize why by the way her expression changes.

You should downvote or ignore trolls, especially if they're that obvious.

The fact his comment isn't grey says something about the HN community.

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#117

Post by djur »

abcd_f wrote: post #81
jonpaul wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're forgetting two key points: 1) Ben is not a native English speaker, so as stated by Ben, he didn't realize it was a big deal. 2) The committer didn't sign a CLA yet.

> Ben is not a native English speaker, so as stated by Ben, he didn't realize it was a big deal. But is it an actually big deal for native speakers? I realize that some people think it's important, but then some people also think that you can't swear in comments and can't use "retard" as a summary opinion about someone else. In live, non-corporate language would any native speaker in fact routinely use "they" instead…

Yes, every day. It would feel unnatural to use 'he' as a generic pronoun in that context.

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#118

Post by nknighthb »

sanxiyn wrote: post #89
nknighthb wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not addressing the subject I am addressing at all. I am the only full-time monolingual employee of the company I work for, the only one who does not speak Mandarin, the only one whose mother tongue is English, the only one who grew up in a primarily English-speaking country, and one of maybe four who would be classified as fluent in English (and that count is probably high). You can't imagine the things that…

I can easily imagine things that pass through such inbox :) I am in a similar situation (a few who is considered good at English in a large group). In addition, I myself am a non-native speaker. I imagine when you correct your co-workers' English, you don't assume malice instead of ignorance. I think you especially don't assume bad intentions when it has to do with tones, nuances, and cultural backgrounds. I am just…

You are mixing contexts. I am not speaking to Ben. When this change was rejected, nobody had said a word against Ben, or anything to or about him at all. And at this point I have no reason to be charitable, he hasn't even apologized, and decided to run away instead.

> I am quite surprised to learn that you imply non-native speakers have "severe interpersonal issues" if they don't "know their limits".

I am relaying my own experience. The only two non-native speakers I encountered who were outright dismissive of linguistic tweaks did have severe interpersonal issues, and as I said, they went well beyond issues of language. We are talking about workplace violence-level issues.

If the reality of my experience makes you uncomfortable, so be it. That alters nothing.

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#119

Post by aquadrop »

Did actually any women complain? Cause all I saw was bunch of guys arguing about how awful it is to use gender pronouns. I wouldn't care if all examples were written with "her". Cause that's absolutely unimportant. As I understand there's more serious, real issues with gender equality, like: salary difference, not promoting women, entering barrier, etc. Not damn "he" in doc examples. And as Ben mentioned he actually do some real things: 'I volunteer in a mentorship program that gets young people - especially young women - involved in technology.' Too bad they all didn't talked it over privately in the very beginning and resolved the issue. That retaliation post by Bryan Cantrill only hurts Joyent's reputation in my eyes.

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#120

Post by wpietri »

malandrew wrote: post #104
wpietri wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the github thread. Ben closed the sincere and well-meant patch, saying, "Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that." He didn't just participate in the drama; he started it. Non-drama options would be things like: asking the contributor more, asking a colleague to look it over, asking a native speaker why it mattered, and just moving past the pull request and leaving it for somebody who cared.

It was a trivial change. It didn't help me nor anyone else understand the code being commented on any better, nor did it change any executable code. That's about as close to the definition of a trivial[0] change that I can think of. Pronoun choice is of little value of importance since this is a open source project, not a college gender studies class. If you think that's not trivial, then take it somewhere where it's…

I understand you believe it was trivial. Maybe Ben Noordhuis still does too. Others disagree.

Using power to force one's own view because one can is a problematic behavior in open source projects. It needlessly costs contributors. And respect.

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