Reformulating an understandable bug report (“the Froobnicator class throws an
uncaught exception when the input contains UTF-8”) into a long-winded user story
(“as a developer, I want to be able to run this software without seeing a 500 line
stack trace when…”) will magically make it easier to plan work.
This is a lie?! Oh my god what are we doing every day!
Everybody should just use MacPorts to install npm to install bower.
:P
Joking aside, I have mixed feelings about #3. On the one hand, the current version of Unicode certainly doesn't cover every character in every known language yet. On the other hand, it's about the best darn effort the world has mustered towards a universal encoding.
As far as encoding goes, I don't think it's wrong to rely on Unicode as the solution. In any case, it's better than every country rolling their own incompatible encoding. Programmers just need to keep in mind that Unicode is an evolving standard - it's at version 7 as we speak. Besides, Unicode has a lot of spare code points and all of human civilised history probably hasn't invented enough glyphs and characters to use them up. If you want to talk about possible outerspace alien languages, well, you'll have other problems, and character encoding won't be your first problem.
And if you're worried about the (in)equivalence between, say ß and ss, then that's a collation problem, and encoding seems the wrong place to solve it because collation is context-dependent.
i would strongly argue #4 is not a lie. show me a language with a third sex/gender, or really any classification system that is widely recognized, that has more then two options(or three if NA is an option).
There's literally hundreds of examples where a third gender is recognized, though obviously not to the same degree as the more common male/female dichotomy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender
Even English is starting to adopt a gender-neutral "they" in preference to the more clinical "it". This is a product of situations where the gender of the subject is not known or not relevant to the discussion.
In US English, it's at least borderline offensive to refer to a person as it. It doesn't make sense to say that "they" is being adopted in place of "it" (you could say that grammar prescriptivists are losing ground in their efforts to say that "they" is wrong).
I'd still much rather invent a pronoun like "xe" than succumb to the increasingly-popular yet cringeworthy mangling of English grammar required to mash "they" into the role of a singular pronoun. I'm indeed losing ground - and sanity - with this view. It's even worse than double-negatives or saying that something is "so wizard" or the recent Icebreakers commercial about mints that are "fruit on one side, cool on the other". It's those little things that make my brain twitch when processing them.
Incidentally, I'm also confused about why so many folks seem to take offense to "it". Is it because it's impersonal? Or perhaps because it represents implicit objectification (which I also don't understand, seeing how everything representable by a concrete noun - and even by most abstract nouns - is inherently an object)? Or perhaps because it's slightly cacophonous? Or because it implies a lack of gender rather than a non-binary gender? Would using "it" as a personal pronoun for someone who lacks any gender identity be appropriate?
Basically, not only is "they" wrong grammatically, but it also fails at it's job and makes little sense semantically. If both genders of a traditionally-binary gender system are expressed, then a new pronoun (like "xe") seems appropriate. If neither gender is expressed, then a neuter pronoun like "it" seems appropriate. If some third gender is expressed, then - like with dual-gender pronouning - creating a new pronoun to represent this seems to be necessary (how about "ve" or "fe" or "te" or something else that looks like "he" or "she" or "xe"?).
In other words, extending the English language to account for a more modern representation of gender needs to be consistent with the rest of the language. "They" breaks language parsing too significantly to be a worthwhile long-term solution.
Not that I agree with you about ‘they’ (although that might be English English vs US English), but Sweden did exactly what you proposed. Traditionally they only had ‘Han’ (he) and ‘hon’ (she) but recently, as in past-two-decades recent, added the gender-neutral oronoun ‘hen’ which is gaining acceptance surprisingly quickly.
"Increasingly popular" - they as a singular pronpun has been pretty common for very many years. It dates back to the 16th century and has been waxing and waning. Prescriptivists might not like it but descriptivists see it being used for hundreds of years.
The problem here is that "it" tends to not just de-genderize, but de-humanize at the same time. "It" is a term used for machinery, for inanimate objects. Some even prefer to use "it" for animals even when their gender is obvious.
Personally I kind of bristle at the idea of someone being called "it", even when they've insisted on being androgynous. Lacking a better option, "they" steps in to fill the gap.
I also can't stand the idea of "xe" catching on. Is that "che" or "ze" or chay?" It seems like the very sort of thing Tumblr's hive mind might churn out.
Perhaps it's just because I consider humans to be machines (or at least minimally different from other animals, which tend to be referred to as "it" when a gender is unknown) that I don't also bristle at the idea of someone being called "it". I call squirrels and dogs and dolphins and giraffes "it", so why should humans get special treatment?
I bristle more at the use of a plural pronoun for a singular entity, which would be the case by adopting "they" as such a pronoun. To me, it implies even more impersonality by lumping folks whose gender is indeterminate or non-binary into a plural group, as if only people in the male/female binary deserve a singular, personal pronoun. That, to me, seems more wrong than "it".
Once upon a time, "he" was usable in gender-neutral contexts in the same way that "man" was equated to "human" rather than "male" (i.e. the "generic he"). If the words "she" and "woman" hadn't been introduced (and if certain lawyers had taken "he" and "man" by their intended, original meanings rather than those in common vernacular), we'd be avoiding all sorts of problems, but seeing as that cat's already out of the bag, we now need a proper neuter singular third-person pronoun to replace "he". I don't particularly care for "xe" either (though I can see where the precedent comes from; some countries - like Australia - have formally recognized an 'X' gender for those who fall outside the male/female binary system), but so far it's the best we've come up with that doesn't make English even less grammatically consistent than it already is.
I personally use "one" in a lot of these circumstances, however; while it, too, lacks perfection, one could use it for a lot of situations where one's writing would normally include a more typical pronoun.
Latin, Greek, and German (among others) recognize three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter. The genders do not necessarily map gracefully onto sexes (see Mark Twain's "The Goddamned German Language" for some cases where this is so). I will leave others to argue the case for using gender to sort of but not quite mean sex.
The parent's point was that many languages incorporate a "neuter" gender that is neither masculine nor feminine, and therefore have a greater assortment of things like pronouns and verb conjugations to account for this. English no longer has such a system (having moved from grammatical to natural gendering during the transition from Old to Modern English), and so has lost most of the corresponding vocabulary, but related languages (like German and Latin) have retained such vocabulary and grammar.
However, there's still at least one gender-neutral third-person pronoun: "it" (AFAIK, all modern English first-person and second-person pronouns are neuter). There's also a proposed "xe" that represents a true third gender (or a neuter gender, depending on who you ask), but its adoption isn't exactly widespread.
