Re: Make primnodes.h gender neutral

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 6:34 PM, Chapman Flack <chap@anastigmatix.net> wrote:
> For those of us who are outside of the twitterverse sort of on purpose,
> are there a few representative links you could post? Maybe this is such
> fresh breaking news Google hasn't spidered it yet, but I didn't find
> any reference to the primnodes language when I looked, and I really am
> curious to see just exactly what kind of issue is being made around it....

Not to pick on you in particular, but rather in general response to
everyone who has expressed doubt about this idea:

Debating whether or not somebody is currently upset about this, and
how upset the are, and what the value is of fixing it is missing the
point.  When somebody sends a patch for a typographical error, we
don't say: well, we could fix that typographical error, but let's wait
until the next time we have cause to reword the paragraph.  We just
commit the patch.  Now, I realize this is not quite the same thing,
because, as Tom rightly points out, it is possible to degrade the
readability of comments or documentation in the pursuit of political
correctness, and we should not do that.  On the other hand, if we
found a comment somewhere in our source code that implied that all of
our users were white, or that they were all English-speaking, or that
one American political party was more worthy than the other, we
wouldn't sit around debating whether it was worth the effort to fix
it.  We would just fix it, even if it meant changing a few surrounding
words rather than just one or two.  And it wouldn't be that much work,
and it wouldn't cause major features to slip out of the release, and
it wouldn't be a waste of time.

Similarly here.  The comment implies that the user is male.  It
shouldn't.  Let's fix it in whatever way is most expedient and move
on.  If at some point we are overwhelmed with a slough of patches
making similar changes, we can at that time ask for them to be
consolidated, just as we would do for typo fixes, grammar fixes, or
warning fixes.  It is not necessary to insist on that that now because
we are not faced with any such issue at this time.  If we gain a
reputation as a community that is not willing to make reasonable
efforts to use gender-neutral language, it will hurt us far more than
the comment itself.  Let's not go there.

-- 
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company