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Ben Noordhuis's Departure

blog.nodejs.org

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Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#191

Post by jacalata »

jack-r-abbit wrote: post #187
jacalata wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do consider that. I am baffled that people are willing to go to the mattresses over something that they don't object to, but which they argue is unimportant to them . That they spend time arguing not 'this is something I think is bad' but 'how dare you spend time on this thing I find unimportant!'

I believe people are going to the mattresses over the rage being directed at him. They are arguing more "how dare you be so enraged at him simply for not finding the issue as important as you do!" This is why I said what I said.

Hm, that's true for a significant amount of the argument since the Joyent blog post, and that's a fair argument. But in my judgment another significant part, and most of the noise in the original commit thread before Ben even reverted the commit, is about the change itself, and featured a lot of 'why are you even touching this, this isn't important, go and teach high school girls to code if you care so much'.

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#192

Post by jack-r-abbit »

jacalata wrote: post #191
jack-r-abbit wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe people are going to the mattresses over the rage being directed at him. They are arguing more "how dare you be so enraged at him simply for not finding the issue as important as you do!" This is why I said what I said.

Hm, that's true for a significant amount of the argument since the Joyent blog post, and that's a fair argument. But in my judgment another significant part, and most of the noise in the original commit thread before Ben even reverted the commit, is about the change itself, and featured a lot of 'why are you even touching this, this isn't important, go and teach high school girls to code if you care so much'.

That is true... some people are angry about that. I don't understand those people too.

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#193

Post by wpietri »

millstone wrote: post #186
wpietri wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The view forced was that the change was trivial. That's the same view you're trying to force here. But at least Noordhuis has the virtue of possibly believing that. You clearly don't; you've got 9 dismissive, rage-y comments on this article. That's not how people react to trivia, which you were helpful enough to define as of little importance. I think you correctly recognize the topic, which is the politics of gender…

The change was not "let's make libuv comments gender neutral," but "here's this one thing I noticed in this one place." A one-off change like that has a trivial impact on the overall gender-inclusiveness of the project, and that's the case no matter what importance you attach to it. If gender-inclusive language in comments is deemed important, then it ought to be treated as important from the contributor side. For ex…

Well, technically, it was two places.

Your theory about Noordhuis is interesting, but there's no evidence for it, and some against. If he had thought it was a good change that just needed more in that direction, he could have easily said that rather than closing the pull request with a discouraging comment.

I think that's true for any change, really. If somebody had fixed a spelling mistake, would any reasonable project leader just have closed the pull request dismissively? I doubt it. Would have they refused to accept the patch until spelling was put in the coding standard and all spelling mistakes were fixed in one go? That'd be crazy.

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#194

Post by ebrescia »

znowi wrote: post #149
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…

Jesus. Take a look at this "patch": https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015/files Ousted the guy because he referred to "user" as a "he" in the comments? Are you fucking kidding me? I'm all for gender equality, but the amount of drama that came out of this is just insane and disturbing for the hacker community. I can not see it as anything more than pure politics and gender issue as a convenient pretext. Joyent has…

Absolutely agree. As a woman in tech, these types of discussions make me sick to my stomach. What an absolute waste of time and energy (except for those using it for political gain, I suppose, but they rarely achieve that through these types of shenanigans.)

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#195

Post by chc »

yebyen wrote: post #161
chc wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ben wasn't "fired" — he voluntarily resigned from the Node and libuv projects because he was so put off by the treatment he was receiving.

Distinctions like that are meaningful to the unemployment office and in a court of law. They actually said they were firing him, publicly, and he left the project. The fact (of law) is probably that he resigned, voluntarily. I actually came to say "I don't care" but after critical analysis, I think you're wrong. He was fired.

StrongLoop did not say they were firing him. They actually said they opposite — that they wanted to keep him on because they benefit from his contributions to the Node and libuv projects. They explicitly noted that the "we will fire him" was a far-future hypothetical situation that they didn't believe would happen.

The reason they mentioned firing was because they were responding to Joyent's suggestion that he should be fired. It seemed to me that the overall thrust of StrongLoop's post was, "We think Joyent are quite hasty if they would fire a great guy and great contributor like Ben over a misunderstanding."

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#196

Post by malandrew »

drderidder wrote: post #176
malandrew wrote: post #112

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

When Ryan originally announced the transition to Joyent, someone asked if node would be moved to Joyent's github repo. Isaac replied: "I hope not". But now he asserts that Joyent owns node, and considers it a "cash cow".

Who owns the trademark?

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#197

Post by millstone »

wpietri wrote: post #193
millstone wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The change was not "let's make libuv comments gender neutral," but "here's this one thing I noticed in this one place." A one-off change like that has a trivial impact on the overall gender-inclusiveness of the project, and that's the case no matter what importance you attach to it. If gender-inclusive language in comments is deemed important, then it ought to be treated as important from the contributor side. For ex…

Well, technically, it was two places. Your theory about Noordhuis is interesting, but there's no evidence for it, and some against. If he had thought it was a good change that just needed more in that direction, he could have easily said that rather than closing the pull request with a discouraging comment. I think that's true for any change, really. If somebody had fixed a spelling mistake, would any reasonable proj…

I guess I'm extrapolating from my own experiences. I review and merge pull requests on a semi-notable project, and I am often tasked with evaluating changes in unfamiliar areas, which means I am liable to misunderstand the significance of a change (as Noordhuis acknowledged he did, not being a native speaker). I appreciate PRs that clearly explain the issues and lay out their case, and I defer many one-offs that I deem not worth the trouble.

So I sympathize with the guy. All I see is someone donating his precious free time acting in what he believes to be the interests of the project, doing his best to handle issues that he poorly understands, because someone has to do it.

I have actually encountered your spelling mistake example. I dealt with it by asking the contributor to vet the code for other instances of the same mistake. The results were fantastic: the contributor was inspired to find all sorts of spelling mistakes, and include them in the PR, resulting in one big commit fixing dozens of errors.

So you are correct to criticize his dismissive comment, and choice to close the PR. That attitude drives away potential contributors, and also invites misunderstanding (in this case, accusations of misogyny).

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#198

Post by ravisarma »

aquadrop wrote: post #119

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…

To answer your question: Yes. https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d... (please scroll).

However, that's not a necessary criteria. Substitute "he" for some other term, say "white person", and I doubt you'll see the need for a specific member of the excluded segment to speak up.

The real argument is around the second part of your comment. Which can be recast as whether male as the default gender, when used in texts, is a matter of concern for the development/opportunities of women. I think so. Along with salary differences, etc. We do not have to reach to Simone de Beauvoir to make that point... here is a link to a current analysis/view: http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/gender-sensitive-langu....

Quote:

> Moreover, these issues are important for people concerned about issues of social inequality. There is a relationship between our language use and our social reality. If we “erase” women from language, that makes it easier to maintain gender inequality. As Professor Sherryl Kleinman (2000:6) has argued, > > [M]ale-based generics are another indicator—and, more importantly, a reinforcer—of a system in which “man” in the abstract and men in the flesh are privileged over women. > > Words matter, and our language choices have consequences. If we believe that women and men deserve social equality, then we should think seriously about how to reflect that belief in our language use.

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#199

Post by centrinoblue »

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…

Did Ben actually confirm he was leaving? If you read hist post on the subject he says:

"I'm probably going to step back from libuv and node.js core development."

Did I miss something?

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#200

Post by centrinoblue »

parennoob wrote: post #11

People who want to ruthlessly enforce their personal version of political correctness (Bryan Cantrill in particular, and Ben's employer Issac Roth, who seems to have competed with Bryan in a no- I -am-the-bigger-asshole contest) forced an important core committer out because he tried to enforce accepted commit policy. This is a particularly aggressive brand of feminism, one that I have mostly seen in the USA. It seem…

Issac Roth is not an asshole. The quote about firing Ben was a joke that didn't translate well.
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