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'Women write more expressive, sensitive code'
- peanutcruncher 18y agoI've been in this business a long time and have yet to meet any women who write code.
- brentr 18y agoUpmodded for the the humor that is almost true.
- tptacek 18y agoI've hired several. Maybe I just got all of them?
- alex_c 18y agoI haven't been in this business that long, but I have met women who write code. Conclusion: we live in parallel universes. That, or single points of data aren't all that useful to a discussion.
- omarseyal 18y agoI've been in this "business" for a short time, and I've met several. Which goes to show you, your personal experience is generally a bad foundation for making sweeping generalizations. I just consider dev-shops that are female dominated to be Black Swans. They haven't happened, and they are unlikely to exist right now, but they certainly could have occurred if some social factors were different, and they certainly might in the future...
- dhs 18y agoEver heard of Grace Murray Hopper?
- ovi256 18y agoPlease prefix her name with Rear Admiral, per proper usage.
- Tichy 18y agoI assume this is a parody, and as such, it is very well done. If not, I can only assume that women has never met Steve Yegge.
- olavk 18y agoIt is not a parody. If you follow the link to the original article, you can see that she is just claiming that women are better at documenting code, which is a reasonable hypothesis. The Inquirer on their own account added the slant about womens code being more "sensitive" and so on, probably to make here look like an idiot. (Also fun to see how "user-friendly and gender-neutral" coding standards in WSJ becomes "womanish" coding standards in the Inquirer :-) Sine there are far fewer women programmers, I would expect the average female programmer to be better than the average male - including being better at documenting code. However the article sounds like she is only basing it on anecdotal evidence. It would be quite interesting to see a more scientific study.
- tptacek 18y agoExplain the statistical reasoning behind "since there are fewer, you expect them to be better".
- olavk 18y agoMy reasoning is: because of male dominance and stereotypes in IT, women will think twice about entering the field. Therefore the ones who choose it, will be more passionate and determined than the average male colleague. It is just my theory, I have never seen any statistical evidence one way or the other.
- helveticaman 18y agoFair enough.
- Tichy 18y agoIn any case, I absolutely loathe the kind of coding standards she is trying to enforce. It sounds like micromanagement bullshit, forcing developers to do stuff they resent. The extreme endresult are those comments on getters and setters in Java: / * gets the variable */ int getVariable() {...} I could scream and climb up walls when I see that or worse, have to write that. If you don't write the comment, though, some fascist "quality control" algorithm will show a read flag and make the managers unhappy. I thought the consent by now was that understandable code is to be preferred over comments, especially since comments have a tendency to become stale.
- ComputerGuru 18y agoAnd men write more code, period.
- ComputerGuru 18y agoI guess I should have made the tongue-in-cheek humor a bit more obvious (my reply was referring to the sensationalist headlines) - I actually have two brilliant women working for me and their coding is awesome :)
- giles_bowkett 18y agoWhat a load of sexist bullshit. I've worked with several women coders. Some were better than others. It's only possible to make this kind of ridiculous blanket statement because so few women coders exist in the first place. Small sample size, nada mas. (Yes, I accused a woman of being sexist. If that doesn't make sense to you please Google sexism instead of bothering me.)
- timr 18y agoTwo words: crocodile tears. I'd think I'd trade 80% of the sexist men in this industry for a few more sexist women.
- menloparkbum 18y agoI've worked in this biz a long time, and have worked with several women, and I've yet to see useful documentation...
- helveticaman 18y agoThis article is disgusting. There's one source, and she's...playa hating, to say the least. Advocating underrepresented minorities is like riding a tank. It's fun, nobody will disagree with you, and if a "tank man" (cf. Tiananmen square) shows up, you can effectively lynch him (cf. Lawrence Summers, James Watson). Now, blatant reverse sexism aside, is the writer correct? There's one source, who may be an itsy-bit biased, but yeah, I believe it. It could be true that women document more. I don't think that they're categorically superior coders, though, as this article seems to imply, and I'm not exactly eager to work at that database company.
- tyn 18y ago"The superwoman of code ..... forcing men to write more detailed accounts of their coding issues, and expressing their programming problems before each new block of code is written" You know much better your programming problems after starting writting code. Prototyping facilitates thinking and designing. The "superwoman" is clueless.
- xenoterracide 18y agointeresting... care to show us this 'wonderful superwoman code' so we can emulate its style?
- ppdes 18y agoI've found this to be true in a bad way. One female co-worker writes comments like this: //Get the HttpSession from request. HttpSession session = request.getSession(); To anyone who knows Java, that comment is just a waste of space that gets in the way.
- bayareaguy 18y ago"forcing men to write more detailed accounts of their coding issues, and expressing their programming problems before each new block of code is written. Lovingly written." Hmm.. I know I wouldn't last there long. My first reaction would be to explain my problems like this: It was a dark and stormy node; the files served from torrents -- except for occasional intervals when checked by a violent gust of spam which swept up the subnet (for it is in the colo that our scene lies), rattling along the interfaces, and fiercely invalidating the scanty lines of the caches that struggled against the load.
- dusklight 18y agoSomething I have learnt the hard way: Comments are bad for you. I used to be a big proponent of comments too, until I realized that having the right variable and function names makes for much better documentation. Any time a chunk of code gets complicated enough for you to feel you need to comment it, you should just abstract it into another function. If you look at arc.arc it is very much written in this fashion. The problem with comments is that they are not tightly coupled to the implementing code .. if someone comments something and then someone else comes along and changes the code without changing the comment, and then someone else comes along and tries to figure out the code by reading the comment ...