gamiddleton (08/15/82)
I have noticed a rather bizarre linguistic quirk in several of the people I work with. When talking about computers, they refer to them as 'it', but programs are referred to as 'he'. This habit is harmless, but a few days ago it caused some confusion, when a certain program was confused with its writer, since the pronoun 'he' was used for both of them, in two consecutive sentences. The point is: why do we do this? and why not call programs 'she'? This would be a reasonable thing to do, first of all, since most of the programmers around here are male, it would prevent the above-mentioned confusion. Secondly, we can eventually modify the usage of 'he' and 'him' to cover humans in general, irrespective of gender, and reserve 'she' for software. A strange idea, and probably thoroughly impractical. By the way, is there anyone out there who calls programs 'he', like us? Or 'she'? -Guy Middleton