Not exactly. There are two Isaacs. Isaac Roth at StrongLoop, author of the OP, he didn't come into the story until today. Isaac Schlueter works for Joyent, and originally committed the requested change.

Yeah, sorry about that; I just caught that mistake myself. Fixed.

Roth is actually Issac, not Isaac.

Duly noted. Thanks.

When did Ben say pronouns should be gendered? I saw nothing on GitHub like that, yet the Joyent post mentions it more than once.

I couldn't find any explicit statement by Noordhuis that could be characterized as what Cantrill called an "insistence that pronouns should in fact be gendered". I took that to be something Cantrill thought was implied by the revert.

However, there's a deleted GitHub comment from Noordhuis that nevertheless still appears on his public activity stream[1]. I starts with:

> For the record, I reverted the merge in 804d40e. Isaac may be a committer but that does not mean he is free to land patches at will. Patches have t…

Perhaps it was stated there?

[1]: https://github.com/bnoordhuis?tab=activity

Seems not: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...

Ultimately, it looks like Ben was fairly impartial about the whole thing - he didn't accept it because it wasn't a significant enough change to merit accepting. He tried to revert the acceptance because the acceptance had been done without approval.

Technically, he was in the right.

Politically, reverting Isaac's commit (and especially doing so with a passive aggressive "Isaac, consider yourself chided." commit message) was clearly a mistake.

A mistake, but only in context of the larger issue. In the context of a reverted commit, it was a fairly laid-back way of saying "you shouldn't have done this direct merge and you probably knew better".

Doesn't look like he did; they appear to be inferring it because he considered the one word change trivial. While I disagree with his call I can't believe how quickly this blew up into a PR storm.

I'm shocked that such an unprofessional blog post made it to the Joyent company blog. It's destroyed what respect I had for them.

Much ado over nothing. "Them" in that context just sounds odd to me (perhaps not in American English?) A 50/50 mix of him/her sounds way more natural.

It's actually the other way around, the objection to the use of singular 'them/they' as a gender indeterminate pronoun is a relatively recent shift apparently originating from American English. It is a form which was otherwise well-established:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Generic_they

(There are example quotes in the link from Shakespeare, Austen, Twain, and Bernard-Shaw)

I was comparing against Indian English, but point noted.

Ah, I wasn't meaning to tell you what the usage is in your country, just trying to make the narrow point about American English.

As an aside, do you mind if I ask, is there a narrative in India about protecting the Indian dialect of English, like you might get in Britain about vulgur Americanization, or in America about pretentious Britishisms?

No there isn't a 'protect Indian English' narrative here.

Not all people belong to the categories "Male" and "Female".

Luckily you won't be fired for this post, but be warned for the future.

I'm all for diversity, but I like my pronouns as they are, thank you.