FactoryGirl? FactoryBot? The Gender War Is On. 23 Oct 2017

FactoryGirl was a ruby gem to help test automation. It followed the SemVer approach to release versioning and scheduling. At least until version 4.8.2 in which they replaced all occurrences of [Gg]irl with [Bb]ot. They then yanked version 4.8.2 off of rubygems and renamed the entire library to factory_bot.

This chain of disorganized, hectic decissions led to quite a few software builds breaking because version 4.8.2 could not be found anymore. While that is a five-minute-problem to fix the basis for this entire ordeal was that someone on the internet felt disturbed in their safe space by a utility which solved a real problem for years; the name of which was inspired by a symbol for feminism in american culture.

I, and I’m sure many others, always enjoyed working in software because the inherent scientifically defined approaches didn’t care much about some abstract socio-political nonsense. But gender equality (which is code for “feminism ftw for the sake of it” and spreads like wild fire into the realms of diversity) has infiltrated the open source community.

Not only that, it takes the form of politicising non-issues and even going so far as becoming recursive, fighting its own means as demonstrated by this very instance, enforcing their newspeak by way of eradicating any subjective and objective differentiation of men, woman, bot and whatever onto just another part of society. You really cannot hide on the internet.

All of this wouldn’t be as bad as it has become if certian people would have the guts and spine to stand up to this madness. But they are happy to throw proven processes over board just to appease the Gods of Gender, the Lords of Diversity, the Spirits of Micro-Aggressions.

If I ever happen to maintain a project with the words “girl”, “man” or “undefined” as parts of its name or code and you give sane and reasonable explanations why those are a real problems and should be replaced, I’ll do so.

Until then, go fix a real issue. Go get a life.

Update

The project’s maintainers are now actively censoring sociopolitical comments on this sociopolitical issue. I get the original comments via email. There’s nothing offensive but much criticism. They point to their Code of Conduct which mainly seeks to prevent harassment which means criticism is now harassment.

This is absolutely obnoxious newspeak and goes to show a deliberate bias or inability to discuss such matters.