On 08/04/2010 02:01 AM, Duncan wrote: <Interesting grammar info snipped for brevity>
Thanks, Duncan. I always learn something interesting when you ramble off- topic. (Which you do very rarely, of course.) I think being forced to pick between he/she when referring to any arbitrary person is simply a bad design decision by whoever invented English. Can you imagine including a spec like that in your new programming language? Your thesis chairperson would suggest you repeat your freshman year and try again after he/she retires.
That said, I suppose partly because the FLOSS coding community is comparatively devoid of female presence, I do tend to assume male unless there's reason to believe otherwise.
I just assume I'm wrong until proven otherwise. My wife taught me that important lesson.
Looking at the whole thing from a different angle, nursing used to be a male dominated profession in which women weren't accepted, and women who went into it were considered strange,
Very interesting. I work in the field myself and I wasn't aware of that.
at minimum (gays/lesbians weren't accepted at all in those days, and a female nurse's sexuality was suspect). How that changed, tho well before me, as at least since I've been around, the profession has been so overwhelmingly female that "male nurse" is often used when one is specifically referring to a guy,
Tragically, there is a large influx of superbly-trained male nurses and techs following every every war the US elects to wage. There may be just as many women, maybe even more, I don't know the numbers, but the men are simply more noticeable in our female-dominated nursing profession. Makes me very sad to think how all those talented men and women earned their expertise.
to prevent the otherwise female assumption. Could/will that some day happen to computer coding? I don't know.
It's already happening. I tune in occasionally to the video streams from M$ and Sun/Oracle and Adobe to listen to the geek-talk, and the number of women participants keeps climbing as the years go by. _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list Pan-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
