PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language that powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.
  • jia_tan@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    2·
    1 month ago

    Genuine question. Why does a program need to know the user’s gender? (I’m asking in general, not in this particular case). Just use gender neutral pronouns to refer to the user, or, better yet, don’t talk to me at all!

    Aside from niche things like targeted ads and gendered health tracking and stuff.

    • Xanza@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      For some languages gender-neutral pronouns aren’t possible or aren’t appropriate. It’s really only in English and maybe five other languages that gender-neutral pronouns are a real thing and even in these languages if you’re not used to using neutral pronouns or reading them in common writing sounds like a mistake to begin with. It’s generally just easier to automate the task based on names, and the library itself comes from a time when that wasn’t a controversial thought. Lol

      • Boomkop3@reddthat.com
        0·
        1 month ago

        English, Dutch, German, Papiamento, Spanish

        just from the top of my head. That can’t be all of them?

        • gerryflap@feddit.nl
          2·
          1 month ago

          I’m Dutch and I have yet to see gender neutral pronouns etc that really work well. Unless you want to be called an “it”, but I’ve only heard people use that to mock people. They/them works quite well, but we don’t really have that afaik

  • SavvyWolf@pawb.socialEnglish
    2·
    1 month ago

    Gender PHP extension is a port of the gender.c program originally written by Joerg Michael. The main purpose is to find out the gender of firstnames. The current database contains >40000 firstnames from 54 countries.

    For anyone curious but not curious enough to go digging around.

  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
    1·
    1 month ago

    If you click around a bit more in that documentation, you can see that that isn’t an enumeration of genders, it’s an interface for answering the question which gender any given name belongs to. (For example, “Andrea” is understood as exclusively feminine for German speakers, but it’s a common male first name in Italy.)