I think those is more like ram/ewe, just words to signify specific objects having gender. But words themselves don't have grammatical gender, not like in Russian and German, where every noun is gendered and all (well, most) adjectives/verbs/etc. have to be modified to fit the gender of the noun. Presents tons of problems for localization, because a) you have to have 3 separate ways of saying the same and b) you can not say something like "user has logged in" without knowing the gender of the user, at least not if you want to sound grammatical.
Also the dispute this generates! You wouldn't believe how many friendships are torn apart over the question of whether it is "die Nutella" oder "das Nutella".
It is "die Nutella", just so we are clear!
My point is that, whenever you want to use a brand name like "Nutella" in a specific context and you're unsure about the gender, you can just use a compound word with a clearly defined gender instead.
On a semi-related note: in the Rhineland gendered articles are also used colloquially when talking about people: "Der Mark", "Die Steffi" and so on. I was born into this but I'm unsure how I feel about it after finding out it's actually non-standard in the rest of Germany.
Not at all. It's often something some people feel quite strongly about and disagree with each other about.
The gender is often derived from synonyms or etymologically related words. I'm guessing the reason it's "Der Computer" for example is that "Computer" works similarly to e.g. "Trockner" (drier) or "Rechner" (calculator, in fact often the German synonym for "Computer") and these are all male (as generally words ending in -er tend to be).
OTOH it's "Das Steak" (maybe because "Das Fleisch" or "Das Kotlett"?) and "Das Shirt" (maybe because "Das Hemd"?). The fallback generally seems to be "das", i.e. neuter, not male.
An example of something with inconsistent use is "Der Laptop" vs "Das Laptop". Presumably this is because "Der Laptop" is derived from "Der Desktop", which in turn is likely simply a shorthand for "Der Desktop-Rechner", making it male. Even the Duden (the closest thing to a "standard" dictionary in Germany) lists it as "der; auch das Laptop" (i.e. "der" seems to be somewhat more common but both are in use).
Not really. In Russian, it's usually follows what it feels intuitively closer to - i.e. if it ends with a vowel like "a", it's likely to be female - Coca-Cola, Nutella, Fanta, etc. If it ends in consonant, it'll be male. If it ends in "o", "e", etc. - probably neuter. Though there could be more complex cases - e.g. I'm not sure what gender would something like "Subaru" assume. Probably depends on implied noun - if it's a "company named Subaru" then probably female, because "company" is female, if it's a restaurant named "Subaru" (assuming such one exists and is not sued for trademark violation) then it's be male because "restaurant" is male. Some speakers would just avoid putting such words into a context where such decision needs to be taken (fortunately, Russian has no articles, so die/der/das is not an issue :) or attaches explicit native noun like "company" or "restaurant" to make it clear.
Some words are kind of gender-fluid too. E.g. a word meaning "hall" was female and neuter in past centuries, and now is male. The word for "coffee" is male in formal/educated speech and neuter is less-educated but (to my despair) rapidly gaining legitimacy speech. Russian is fun :)
For things like the user, you can always assume male, but as with other such assumptions, some people may object to it. In some cases, there is a built-in assumption that male includes female when gender is unknown, but in others it just means male and that's it.
It once was (and e.g. newspapers still generally only use the masculine form) but this is a very political question. At work we are ordered to use e.g. Bürger/-in (others use Bürgerin oder Bürger which is just both forms written out). Sometimes there is gender-neutral word (such as Lehrkraft instead of Lehrer) that is a good alternative.
You can technically construct a female-gendered noun for "user" in Russian as well - there's a generic construct for that - it just looks really awkward.
I see. My sense is that the Spanish one is actually used if you do know the user is female, but of course most software doesn't know the gender and defaults to masculine form.
German now has a number of competing, made up schemes to degender so that a minority of women can do an inner victory fistpump whenever they see the language pockmarked with their particular brand of degendering.
What they all missed was that German already had degendering built right in, the diminutive (something dearly missing from the English language) :
der Holzfäller -> das Holzfällerchen, der General -> das Generälchen, die Kanzlerin -> das Kanzlerchen, die Maid -> das Mädchen
