Make primnodes.h gender neutral

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 3:31 PM, Joshua D. Drake <jd@commandprompt.com> wrote:

Per the twitter verse, here is an updated version of primnodes.h

+1.

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Robert Haas wrote:

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 3:31 PM, Joshua D. Drake <jd@commandprompt.com> wrote:

Per the twitter verse, here is an updated version of primnodes.h

+1.

+1 what? Are you saying this patch is good? I don't think it is: the
previous sentence is written in third person, and the following ones are
currently in third person, but the patch changes the following sentences
to first person without changing the first one to match. If he or she
(or they) want this updated, I think we should at least make an effort
of keeping it as consistent as it is today.

I *hope* this isn't the start of a trend to patch 1500 files one by one,
each on its own thread. That's going to be annoying and noisy, achieve
nothing useful(*), and cause backpatching pain that the "twitter
verse"(**) is not going to help with.

(*) I'm probably going to be expelled from the project for saying this,
but I very much doubt that female coders stay away from PostgreSQL just
because some files say "he" in comments rather than "she" or "he or she"
or "one" or "they". They probably have different reasons for staying
away from the project.

(**) "Verse" is a word, but it doesn't mean what you seem to think it
does.

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On 03/17/2016 01:36 PM, Alvaro Herrera wrote:

Robert Haas wrote:

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 3:31 PM, Joshua D. Drake <jd@commandprompt.com> wrote:

Per the twitter verse, here is an updated version of primnodes.h

+1.

+1 what? Are you saying this patch is good? I don't think it is: the
previous sentence is written in third person, and the following ones are
currently in third person, but the patch changes the following sentences
to first person without changing the first one to match. If he or she
(or they) want this updated, I think we should at least make an effort
of keeping it as consistent as it is today.

The wording was Meh to begin with. If you would like me to spend some
time cleaning up the paragraph as a whole, I will do that.

I *hope* this isn't the start of a trend to patch 1500 files one by one,
each on its own thread. That's going to be annoying and noisy, achieve
nothing useful(*), and cause backpatching pain that the "twitter
verse"(**) is not going to help with.

So we have two choices I see:

1. As we come across the gender issue, we fix it as well as incorporate
a gender neutral requirement for all documentation unless the gender is
relevant to the context.

2. We do "one big patch".

#2 seems to be a really bad idea.

(*) I'm probably going to be expelled from the project for saying this,
but I very much doubt that female coders stay away from PostgreSQL just
because some files say "he" in comments rather than "she" or "he or she"
or "one" or "they". They probably have different reasons for staying
away from the project.

Wanna bet? There is a very loud movement about this. We can either:

A. Start fighting about it

B. Just fix it, it doesn't matter anyway and it doesn't hurt the quality
of the code or the documentation

JD

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"Joshua D. Drake" <jd@commandprompt.com> writes:

On 03/17/2016 01:36 PM, Alvaro Herrera wrote:

+1 what? Are you saying this patch is good? I don't think it is: the
previous sentence is written in third person, and the following ones are
currently in third person, but the patch changes the following sentences
to first person without changing the first one to match. If he or she
(or they) want this updated, I think we should at least make an effort
of keeping it as consistent as it is today.

The wording was Meh to begin with. If you would like me to spend some
time cleaning up the paragraph as a whole, I will do that.

I think it's important that we fix these issues in a way that doesn't
degrade the readability of the prose, and that doesn't call attention
to itself as "hey, we're being so politically correct!". We're trying
to convey technical information in a way that does not distract the
reader from the technical content. Sexist language is a distraction
for some, in-your-face non-sexism (such as made-up pronouns) is a
distraction for others, bad or awkward grammar is a distraction for yet
others. It's not that easy to write prose that manages not to call
attention to itself in any of these ways. But that's what we need to
do, and s/xxx/yyy/g editing that's only thinking about one of these
concerns is unlikely to get us there.

I also concur with Alvaro that fixing these issues one para at a time
is pretty inefficient.

regards, tom lane

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On 03/17/2016 02:11 PM, Tom Lane wrote:

"Joshua D. Drake" <jd@commandprompt.com> writes:

On 03/17/2016 01:36 PM, Alvaro Herrera wrote:

+1 what? Are you saying this patch is good? I don't think it is: the
previous sentence is written in third person, and the following ones are
currently in third person, but the patch changes the following sentences
to first person without changing the first one to match. If he or she
(or they) want this updated, I think we should at least make an effort
of keeping it as consistent as it is today.

The wording was Meh to begin with. If you would like me to spend some
time cleaning up the paragraph as a whole, I will do that.

I think it's important that we fix these issues in a way that doesn't
degrade the readability of the prose,

I don't disagree.

and that doesn't call attention
to itself as "hey, we're being so politically correct!". We're trying
to convey technical information in a way that does not distract the
reader from the technical content. Sexist language is a distraction
for some, in-your-face non-sexism (such as made-up pronouns) is a
distraction for others, bad or awkward grammar is a distraction for yet
others.

I also concur with Alvaro that fixing these issues one para at a time
is pretty inefficient.

How else are we going to do it? If we use sed, we are basically going to
end up with the "hey, we're being so politically correct!" issue. The
only other way I can think to fix it is to fix it as we come across it.
If you are in a file and see the gender issue, just fix it as part of
the patch you are working on.

JD

regards, tom lane

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On 18/03/16 09:41, Joshua D. Drake wrote:

On 03/17/2016 01:36 PM, Alvaro Herrera wrote:

[...]

(*) I'm probably going to be expelled from the project for saying this,
but I very much doubt that female coders stay away from PostgreSQL just
because some files say "he" in comments rather than "she" or "he or she"
or "one" or "they". They probably have different reasons for staying
away from the project.

Wanna bet? There is a very loud movement about this. We can either:

A. Start fighting about it

B. Just fix it, it doesn't matter anyway and it doesn't hurt the
quality of the code or the documentation

JD

I strongly think that gender should not be mentioned unless it is
relevant - as constructs like 'he or she' are clumsy and distract from
what is being commented on, not to mention that some rare people are:
neither, both, or ambiguous (from research I did when I read a rather
curious article).

Other than 'one', 'their', 'they', &' them' - there are role specific
references like 'user', 'developer', & 'DBA', ... that can be used where
appropriate.

I tend to prefer the term 'Gender Appropriate' rather than 'Gender
Neutral', as sometimes mentioning gender IS very relevant!

Cheers,
Gavin

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On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 4:11 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:

I think it's important that we fix these issues in a way that doesn't
degrade the readability of the prose, and that doesn't call attention
to itself as "hey, we're being so politically correct!". We're trying
to convey technical information in a way that does not distract the
reader from the technical content. Sexist language is a distraction
for some, in-your-face non-sexism (such as made-up pronouns) is a
distraction for others, bad or awkward grammar is a distraction for yet
others. It's not that easy to write prose that manages not to call
attention to itself in any of these ways. But that's what we need to
do, and s/xxx/yyy/g editing that's only thinking about one of these
concerns is unlikely to get us there.

+1

I also concur with Alvaro that fixing these issues one para at a time
is pretty inefficient.

A grep with a quick skim of the results to exclude references to
particular people who are mentioned by name and then referred to
with a pronoun (which I assume we can leave alone), suggest there
are about 70 lines in the 1346667 line C code base that need work.

Any word-smiths out there who want to volunteer to sort this out?

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On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 2:17 PM, Gavin Flower <GavinFlower@archidevsys.co.nz

wrote:

On 18/03/16 09:41, Joshua D. Drake wrote:

On 03/17/2016 01:36 PM, Alvaro Herrera wrote:

[...]

(*) I'm probably going to be expelled from the project for saying this,
but I very much doubt that female coders stay away from PostgreSQL just
because some files say "he" in comments rather than "she" or "he or she"
or "one" or "they". They probably have different reasons for staying
away from the project.

Wanna bet? There is a very loud movement about this. We can either:

A. Start fighting about it

B. Just fix it, it doesn't matter anyway and it doesn't hurt the quality
of the code or the documentation

JD

I strongly think that gender should not be mentioned unless it is relevant
- as constructs like 'he or she' are clumsy and distract from what is being
commented on, not to mention that some rare people are: neither, both, or
ambiguous (from research I did when I read a rather curious article).

Other than 'one', 'their', 'they', &' them' - there are role specific
references like 'user', 'developer', & 'DBA', ... that can be used where
appropriate.

I tend to prefer the term 'Gender Appropriate' rather than 'Gender
Neutral', as sometimes mentioning gender IS very relevant!

​That's only half the issue. If some people want to review every new patch
for gender appropriateness and point out any problems before those patches
get committed I'm doubting anyone is going to complain.

The question here is whether we should fix the wording of a comment that
was added in, and exists unchanged since, 7.2

IMO we can be more sensitive to these issues in the present without having
to apologize for (and fix) this project's history and the writing of people
who may no longer even be around. Hopefully this compromise position is
sufficiently accommodating - I am personally fine if the people with real
control decide to operate under this premise.

​If we are going to make a concerted effort to change historical writing we
might as well just take the hit and "s/he/one/g"​. Later, if someone
reading the revised wording finds it distasteful they can fix those
instances that are so egregious or presently-relevant to warrant the effort.

If we do this how many new developers are we expecting to subscribe to the
-hackers list and make serious contributions - say, by reviewing the large
backlog of patches we presently have?

David J.

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 4:34 PM, David G. Johnston
<david.g.johnston@gmail.com> wrote:

If we do this how many new developers are we expecting to subscribe to the
-hackers list and make serious contributions - say, by reviewing the large
backlog of patches we presently have?

I would certainly welcome even one new contributor who would do
this without causing any new feature to slip from the next release.
;-)

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Joshua D. Drake wrote:

On 03/17/2016 01:36 PM, Alvaro Herrera wrote:

Robert Haas wrote:

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 3:31 PM, Joshua D. Drake <jd@commandprompt.com> wrote:

Per the twitter verse, here is an updated version of primnodes.h

+1.

+1 what? Are you saying this patch is good? I don't think it is: the
previous sentence is written in third person, and the following ones are
currently in third person, but the patch changes the following sentences
to first person without changing the first one to match. If he or she
(or they) want this updated, I think we should at least make an effort
of keeping it as consistent as it is today.

The wording was Meh to begin with. If you would like me to spend some time
cleaning up the paragraph as a whole, I will do that.

I'd rather you left it alone until we had some other reason to change
that text, then reword it completely.

I *hope* this isn't the start of a trend to patch 1500 files one by one,
each on its own thread. That's going to be annoying and noisy, achieve
nothing useful(*), and cause backpatching pain that the "twitter
verse"(**) is not going to help with.

So we have two choices I see:

1. As we come across the gender issue, we fix it as well as incorporate a
gender neutral requirement for all documentation unless the gender is
relevant to the context.

I support the idea of changing our user-visible docs, error messages etc
to be gender neutral, but going down to comments in header files seems
pointless -- until those comments need to be rewritten for some
different reason.

2. We do "one big patch".

#2 seems to be a really bad idea.

Sure.

(*) I'm probably going to be expelled from the project for saying this,
but I very much doubt that female coders stay away from PostgreSQL just
because some files say "he" in comments rather than "she" or "he or she"
or "one" or "they". They probably have different reasons for staying
away from the project.

Wanna bet? There is a very loud movement about this.

I don't doubt that there's a lot of people with a lot of time in their
hands. No doubt they are loud, either.

Are they going to contribute something actually useful after we fix all
the "he" in the code comments? That's the part that I don't believe. I
mean new features, bug fixes, more tests, code refactoring, better
system integration, new drivers -- whatever. Heck, are they going to
answer more questions in mailing lists?

Anyway, this is a -1 from me. If others decide that this is important
and want to do the job, that's fine; I can deal with the conflicts.

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On 03/17/16 17:29, Kevin Grittner wrote:

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 4:11 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:

Sexist language is a distraction
for some, in-your-face non-sexism (such as made-up pronouns) is a
distraction for others, bad or awkward grammar is a distraction for yet
others. It's not that easy to write prose that manages not to call
attention to itself in any of these ways. But that's what we need to
do, and s/xxx/yyy/g editing that's only thinking about one of these
concerns is unlikely to get us there.

+1

^^^ I would have said that if I'd been fast enough.

A grep with a quick skim of the results to exclude references to
particular people who are mentioned by name and then referred to
with a pronoun (which I assume we can leave alone), suggest there
are about 70 lines in the 1346667 line C code base that need work.

Any word-smiths out there who want to volunteer to sort this out?

So that must be N affected files for some N <= 70 ...

what would you think of starting a wiki page with those N filenames
(so nobody has to repeat your grepping/skimming effort), and volunteers
can claim a file or five, marking them taken on that page, and wordsmith
away?

On 03/17/16 17:17, Gavin Flower wrote:

Wanna bet? There is a very loud movement about this.

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....

-Chap

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Chapman Flack <chap@anastigmatix.net> writes:

On 03/17/16 17:29, Kevin Grittner wrote:

A grep with a quick skim of the results to exclude references to
particular people who are mentioned by name and then referred to
with a pronoun (which I assume we can leave alone), suggest there
are about 70 lines in the 1346667 line C code base that need work.

Any word-smiths out there who want to volunteer to sort this out?

So that must be N affected files for some N <= 70 ...

what would you think of starting a wiki page with those N filenames
(so nobody has to repeat your grepping/skimming effort), and volunteers
can claim a file or five, marking them taken on that page, and wordsmith
away?

Yeah, Kevin, could you post your results? I'd have guessed there were
more trouble spots than that. If that really is the size of the problem,
seems like we could fix all those instances in one patch and be done
with it. (At least till new ones sneak in :-()

regards, tom lane

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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.

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On Mar 17, 2016, at 12:31 PM, Joshua D. Drake <jd@commandprompt.com> wrote:

Per the twitter verse, here is an updated version of primnodes.h
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I don't have any political opinion about this sort of thing, but I'd rather
core developers don't waste any time on it. Let me get you a patch
that covers this, and if nobody objects I'll attempt to back patch it and
submit that, too. If nobody likes the changes, I won't mind throwing
them out; as I said, I don't have an opinion on the politics.

Please, don't waste your time if you have actual features to implement.

Regards,
Mark Dilger

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On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 4:09 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:

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

Right. We could spend significant time debating how much this matters.
I expect that few if any contributors would consider that a policy on
gendered pronouns has negative value, though, and it really isn't that
hard to fix. So we should just fix it.

(In case it matters, I'm in favor of this proposal on its merits).

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Peter Geoghegan <pg@heroku.com> writes:

(In case it matters, I'm in favor of this proposal on its merits).

For the record, I'm also in favor of fixing that para, but I'd like
to see attention paid to grammatical correctness as well as political.
Alvaro's original complaint that the sentences no longer agree as to
person is on-point.

regards, tom lane

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On 03/17/16 19:09, Robert Haas wrote:

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 6:34 PM, Chapman Flack <chap@anastigmatix.net> wrote:

Not to pick on you in particular...
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.

Well, looking at my response in particular, you can see that I *began
it* with concrete constructive suggestions about fixing it, so that was
never part of the question. (I work pretty hard at non-obtrusively-gendered
language myself, I'm from a region/era where that was a thing to strive
for so it feels natural to me ... not that I never have something slip out
that someone might object to, but most obviously gendered usages already
sound funny to me, so by and large I avoid them.)

It was only in the later part of my comment that I asked for a link,
and even there I said nothing about "whether or not somebody is currently
upset", and certainly not "Is it ridiculous?" as in Joshua's response to
me. I just wanted a chance to read the comments in question, because
I hadn't been able to google them, and I *wanted the chance to get familiar
with the opinions and arguments of those vocally concerned in their own
words* ... because that's a thing I like to do.

So Joshua included the link, so I'll go read now.... :)

-Chap

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On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 4:46 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:

Alvaro's original complaint that the sentences no longer agree as to
person is on-point.

That's reasonable. Still, there are only a few existing instances of
gendered pronouns in the code, so fixing them carefully, without
losing anything important seems like a relatively straightforward
task.

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On Thursday, March 17, 2016, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 6:34 PM, Chapman Flack <chap@anastigmatix.net
<javascript:;>> 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....

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.

And if someone had just posted the patch and not prefaced it "we need to
check all of our comments for gender usage" it probably would have slipped
thorough without comment.

But that isn't what happened and since, based upon previous comments, we
expected many other commits of this sort we rightly discussed how to do
it. The original author indeed figured one patch per file was probably a
good way to do things but I can others would seem to prefer one targeted
patch.

Beyond that it's the usual bike shedding when it comes to writing...which
was the original contra-vote.

David J.