lime

which means it's imperative that everyone does this going forward.

sola i karlsta vettu

hey if the reviewers don't read the paper that's on them.

i spend €8 a year on razors, how many barber visits is that?

i'm not really talking about the grammar, but about the cultural meanings of the words. there may be implied gender in a mode of speaking even in a language without gendered pronouns. my grandmother would always assume people i was talking about were male if i didn't use a gendered pronoun (like i would be talking about a colleague by referring to them as "my colleague") because that's the "cultural default" here still. it has changed a lot in the past five-ten years but it's still the default.

and i actually don't know where we got "hen" from. i do know that it was not originally meant to be an actual gender-neutral pronoun, but as a placeholder where gender is unknown or unimportant. it was created to replace the more cumbersome "han/hon" in legal texts, and not meant to be used to refer to specific people. but we do that anyway because it helps adoption.

looking it up it does seem to be taken from finnish! their word is "hän", which would be pronounced about the same. i learned something.

yeah that ties in to my other comment; it's not political in american english culture (well it is, but only to chuds), but other countries don't have the same context for this stuff. and when those cultural barriers are crossed without knowing the differences, there is bound to be friction.

yeah smaller languages have taken longer to adapt to that change, because it started in the anglophone world and the concepts of gendered language don't translate well. it's like how the word "man" in english used to mean "human" and not be gendered at all, and when language is updated to remove the -- now gendered -- word and then translated, the translation stops making any sense because the context of a word is so different.

i always give massive leeway when language is involved, because the culture around progressive language is basically 99% centred on the US.

i can offer some context to that, but first let's clear up that all the documentation has since been updated to use second-person pronouns, making it both friendlier and gender neutral. kling is fully on-board with that change.

the issue came in right after the big wave of people doing drive-by "code of conduct" PRs. there was a plague of accounts that only did that, and had no other connections to either projects or people. this is obviously a form of political activism, and while it's not malicious, it does get in the way for volunteer developers of big open-source projects who are usually already swamped with work they're not paid for. so creating these giant documents that have not been pre-discussed with the team doing the project is disruptive and misguided. having a code of conduct is good, but it needs to match the project.

anyway, in the middle of this a big PR comes in which changes shitloads of documentation. the standard PR view doesn't show each change, it just shows "n files changed, +n lines -n lines", and a description talking about "gender-neutral language". now, kling is not a "typical" developer. he's a former addict who started doing serenity and ladybird as therapy/rehab. i don't know what that's like, but i imagine it means you don't have a lot of mental overhead for things you don't want to do. so kling saw the description and the massive change set and didn't want to deal with it.

it took a while but he was convinced to change it. if he had not, i would not be as charitable.

this is incorrect. we recently added a neuter singular pronoun. "hen" was introduced in 2009, and not widely used until like 2019. Also, in technical documentation, masculine pronouns were taught as the default to use (both in swedish and in english) when i was in university in the early 10s. this has changed now, but it definitely wasn't on the table when kling was in school.

...wait, really? is that what we've changed it to?

sounds like you grew up in america.

then you and i must be in different parts of the world because here, most people in coffee shops just used to read the paper.