I think a better solution would be to select random gendered pronouns
This can work, and it's certainly good practice when one is talking about social situations, and is one of the reason that "Alice and Bob" are such enduring characters. It's probably less good when one is talking about computations, where gender (and, indeed, personhood) is just a distraction, unless we really do believe in feminine functions and masculine monads.
It also wouldn't have helped much in the original Github issue, where a single instance of 'he' was being corrected. Git's patch-oriented workflow is great for correcting local bugs but not so great for global things like "do we have the correct balance of pronoun genders across our codebase?". I think if you ever end up having to ask that question, something has gone badly wrong.
If the interacting entities are not persons, we have "it" as a neuter pronoun. If they are persons, we can use "he" and "she" alternately, "he/she" (somewhat cumbersome and stilted), or "they".
This can work, and it's certainly good practice when one is talking about social situations, and is one of the reason that "Alice and Bob" are such enduring characters. It's probably less good when one is talking about computations, where gender (and, indeed, personhood) is just a distraction, unless we really do believe in feminine functions and masculine monads.
It also wouldn't have helped much in the original Github issue, where a single instance of 'he' was being corrected. Git's patch-oriented workflow is great for correcting local bugs but not so great for global things like "do we have the correct balance of pronoun genders across our codebase?". I think if you ever end up having to ask that question, something has gone badly wrong.