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A comment on Learning Haskell – A Racket programmer's foray into the land of Haskell. Parent comment

Re:Learning Haskell – A Racket programmer's foray into the l... by peteretep on Wednesday March 11, 2015 @08:37PM (#9188477) 

    > You're going to spend all that work using "the author"
    > everywhere and still manage to get my gender wrong
    > ("his")?
Where would you have had the commenter go to establish your gender? You haven't attached your name to the article, but even if you had, it's a name that in many countries is male anyway. Would you have rather the commenter have said 'their'?
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Re:Learning Haskell – A Racket programmer's foray into the l... by JadeNB on Wednesday March 11, 2015 @10:31PM (#9188918)
> Would you have rather the commenter have said 'their'?

As the poster demonstrated (by using "the author" in almost all places), it is often possible to go without pronouns entirely, at the expense of some repetitiveness or awkwardness. In this case, all that would have been required would have been to change

> The author spends a lot of effort trying to make his functions point-free.

to

> The author spends a lot of effort trying to make functions point free.

or, if the possessive is really important, the awkward

> The author spends a lot of effort trying to make the author's [or just "his or her"] functions point free.

However, as I have said elsethread, I think that this was almost certainly inattentiveness rather than any attempt to perpetuate gender biases.

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Re:Learning Haskell – A Racket programmer's foray into the l... by codygman on Thursday March 12, 2015 @12:02AM (#9189151)
I personally would have gone with:

> The author spends a lot of effort trying to make their functions point free.

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Re:Learning Haskell – A Racket programmer's foray into the l... by JadeNB on Sunday March 22, 2015 @09:49PM (#9249071)
Then your answer to peteretep's question (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9188477) "Would you have rather the commenter have said 'their'?" is 'yes', which is fine.

I agreed with what I took (emphasis: my interpretation, not endorsed by peteretep) to be the subtext of that question, namely that the use of 'their' in that context is undesireable, and argued that it was not the only alternative to a gendered pronoun.

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Re:Learning Haskell – A Racket programmer's foray into the l... by MBlume on Wednesday March 11, 2015 @09:31PM (#9188704)
> Would you have rather the commenter have said 'their'?

Yes, of course.

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Re:Learning Haskell – A Racket programmer's foray into the l... by omaranto on Thursday March 12, 2015 @08:13AM (#9190224)
The sentence in question is:

"The author spends a lot of effort trying to make his functions point-free."

You can simply remove the word "his".

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