Fun debate on the use of "they"

There's a fun archived debate in a discussion on Groklaw (the actual discussion has to do with a comparison of the formatting approaches of OpenOffice's vs. MS's document standards (the OpenOffice one was approved today, yay!). The discussion, though, dealt with the use of the word "they" as a gender neutral pronoun

Unless it is appropriate, can people please avoid using gender specific
pronouns. It doesn't matter in this article whether, or not, the developer is
female - but it keeps referring to "her", it would be better to use
"their" instead. Constant reference to "her" imply that
most developers are female.

Traditionaaly "he" has been used to indicate either gender, and it is
the greatest common string of characters in "He" and She". Also,
"she" has traditionally be associated with females only. But, I would
recommend using "their" and "they" rather than
"hers/his" and "he/she".

Also using gender neutral language avoids offending people who identify
themselves with both genders (they are rare, but I spoken with several). Note
that using "themselves" is a lot more elegant and shorter than saying
"herself or himself".

Constant inappropriate use of gender distracts from the otherwise excellent
technical article.

As the author mentioned, the article used "she" when referring to an individual programmer who might be working with the two XML formatting approaches. The replies ranged from "get over it" to nostalgic remeniscences of manuals using "she" to discussions on the latinizing movement of the 19th century to the lack of gendered pronouns in Finnish to the centuries old usage of they as a neuter singular in English. This is the sort of nit-picky, sleeves rolled up discussion that makes it fun to be a techie! Lateral thinkers of the world disperse!

I had a funny experience with the neuter use of "he" at my MA graduation ceremony. The honourary speaker at the graduation was a former Ontario Supreme Court judge and a woman. She started off her speech by saying that she would be referring to the singular person as "he", using the "neutral" usage. Fiona, my femenist co-graduand who was sitting beside me, could barely repress the urge to grind her teeth in anger. The judge was probably just acting out a well-worn habit of qualifying everything she said.

Wikipedia has a nice overview of the usage of "they" as a singular pronoun, including a section on historical usage, inluding by Shakespeare. That settles it then.

Incidentally, the Microsoft XML programming style makes me think it was designed by a bunch of people who love programming in C. It's very pointer-oriented. Normalized as well. Not readable.