Slashdot Mirror
Do Women Write Better Code?
JCWDenton writes "The senior vice-president of engineering for computer-database company Ingres-and one of Silicon Valley's highest-ranking female programmers-insists that men and women write code differently. Women are more touchy-feely and considerate of those who will use the code later, she says. They'll intersperse their code ... with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the lines the way they did and exactly how they did it. The code becomes a type of 'roadmap' for others who might want to alter it or add to it later, says McGrattan, a native of Ireland who has been with Ingres since 1992. Men, on the other hand, have no such pretenses. Often, 'they try to show how clever they are by writing very cryptic code,' she tells the Business Technology Blog. 'They try to obfuscate things in the code,' and don't leave clear directions for people using it later. "
I don't know, I've never even seen a woman programmer. And I work in the field. I bet nobody on Slashdot has either. (this is a joke!)
I've seen all genders write obfuscated code--but it worked. And every single time it was because we were under the gun for a deadline or there was simply no other way to do it. It's preposterous to even try to sound like you have empirical data supporting this blanket assessment. There's a big need to fix testosterone-fueled code at Ingres
I could combat her anecdotal subjective statements (probably describing herself) with my own anecdotes or go on a rant about how many of the great programmers are men (like Donald Knuth and his 'literate programming') but what's the point? Men can be just as meticulous as women can at providing good documentation and women can be just as sloppy.
It's good to have a healthy mix of diversity and I wish that programmers were 50/50 split on gender (trust me, I really really do) but it's not because women are better than men at coding. Prime example of American sexism in one of the few forms it exists today.
My work here is dung.
and see how harmonic they all work together
Men's code is sexist and demeaning whereas woman's code will marry you for the divorce settlement.
they freak out everytime they miss a period.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
"Men and women think differently."
This is such shocking news. Unbelievable.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
Inflammatory short article to "sex things up" (pun intended); surprising for the WSJ (or maybe not.) Written by a Rebecca Buckman, quoting Emma McGrattan at database company Ingres.
Any such broad classifications such as this should be taken with a *lot* of salt.
That being said, the article reminded me of a large digital systems design project that I had back in college, writing assembly for a 6502 processor in a device we made. My lab partner was a girl (probably only 10% of the class was female) who really, really thought differently than me in a way. It was weird -- some of the things I thought were impossible or not worth doing she would code in 10 hours; and the reverse was true. It was pretty much pure synergy (forgive the cheesy phrase) and we were extremely productive and got along well.
However, to reduce anything like this to gender differences is almost nonsensical. I could have been good lab partners with any number of people that thought differently than me, male or female. Personality is complex, not binary. I know many girls that code beautifully, and many more that can not code at all. This article is kind of interesting cocktail conversation, but nothing more IMHO...
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
My friends include a woman who writes 100-line SQL statements embedded in a perl-script. You need a magic decoder ring just to see what's there.
// Loop counts from i to j, with increments of one .... } ...and no, his job does not include teaching basics of programming.
A male colleague, OTOH, likes to write code in style such as
for (unsigned int i=0;ij;i = i + 1)
{
There, I've the counterpoint for the article with my own biased view!
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
This article told me I code like a woman. I knew playing all those female characters in RPGs would come back to haunt me.
/cry
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
Often, "they try to show how clever they are by writing very cryptic code," she tells the Business Technology Blog.
Yeah... the advice to add comments explaining why and how is good, but how about you stop telling us what we're thinking and what our motivations are. If I do do something "clever", I'll sure as hell make it clear how it works and why I did it. And the reason for it is because it's the best way to do things. I don't have to prove anything.
What's a prime example? The fact that coding is a male dominated workplace? Or that someone can make blanket, derogatory statements against a group of people based on their sex/race/religion and get away with it?
Never mind, actually. I'd agree either way.
I know the plural of "anecdote" is not "data", but in my experiences this is far from true. I have found female coders in my jobs to be downright malevolent in their coding. All women I have worked with that write any sort of code obfuscate the hell out of it, document absolutely nothing, and will barely explain how to even use their product. If everything is not run "their way", then it seems like armageddon.
Case in point. We have a coder who wrote an application for our office. Because of the fact that she refused to use any variable for the Program Files folder (hard coded as "c:\Program Files\") and she insisted that all workstations need a D: partition (to hold a 100kb support file), we had to rebuild 4 servers.
Say what you will about women coders being "touchy feely." I won't fall for it, any more than the NOW propoganda that all women are natural caring mothers, even the coked out alcoholics.
And if I ever come across a woman programmer, I'll prove it.
I also comment obsessively because I want to be able to come back to the code a year later and know, quickly, what I did and why I did it.
Many years ago I was porting someone else's C code from 16 bit to 32 bit and came across "//Why did I do this?" at the top of a couple hundred lines of uncommented code that had multiple embedded while anf for loops, with a pow() and a couple of sizeof()'s in there. I had to print it out and trace it by hand to figure out what he'd done, and why. Took awhile.
Too many comments can be ignored, too few can give you heartburn.
Best Slashdot Co
Forget a male/female issue. I think she needs to hire better programmers period. Anyone in a professional code shop that's deliberately trying to write obfuscated code shouldn't be there and she's not doing her job properly if she's not firing them or getting them into remedial classes of some kind.
If someone wrote an article that was the opposite of this, from a "man's point of view" it would be extremely sexist, and the publisher, writer, and anyone quoted in the article would burn in the ninth layer of hell for being such a terrible person.
You're missing a "<"
This sounds like a severe case of deciding on a problem, and then picking out observations to support it. Let's say you have 1000 coders, and 1/10 of your coders (100 of them) write poorly documented code. Now we'll also consider the gender-split - if 1/10 of the coder population is female, and the statistical 1/10 of the coders writing poorly documented code applies to them as well - this means you'll have 10 female coders writing poor documentation, and 90 male coders writing poor documentation. WOW! NINE TIMES as many male coders who can't document code properly, CLEARLY that means that men can't document code, right? Right?
The same sort of thing applied here at the University I teach at - a certain ethnic minority had a very bad reputation as producing cheaters in Comp.Sci. So for a few years, I carefully recorded every instance of cheating, and kept track of the ethnic background of the people getting caught. You know what? The only reason more people of that background were getting caught is because they represented 85% of the population in the department - the overall percentage of them that were cheating was actually LOWER than others.
Perhaps this McGrattan person should concentrate more on fixing the problems than on blaming them on some group she doesn't like.
Sounds like they need some real R&D management and processes. I have worked with both male and female programmers for 25 years and they both write code in the style required by the company, period. Maybe people sitting in a basement somewhere write code differently, certainly there is *some* 'freelance' coding going on in smaller companies (vast generalization) but when it comes to application code written by large companies, any R&D manager worth their salt is going to put a stop to people writing code in a questionable style and/or not putting in sufficient comments.
>// Loop counts from i to j, with increments of one
>for (unsigned int i=0;ij;i = i + 1)
This loop starts at zero and keeps incrementing by one as long as the variable ij is non-zero. Your male colleague is an idiot.
If women were intended to write code, there would be more keyboards in the kitchen.
-Lars
My ex-girlfriend wrote fairly male-like code. No comments, not often formatted properly, not always the clearest way of doing things, etc. I, on the other hand, am anal about formatting and logical structure, although I am still pretty light on the comments. And I never try to malevolently write unmaintainable code...quite the opposite, in fact. When I'm writing one-off perl scripts, I will, however, try to be as clever as possible ;).
-those strings of instructions that result in nifty applications and programs-
Why do you need to explain what code is? This is news for nerds, not news for my mother. Give us some credit please.
In my department (only about 10 people) the women seem much more willing to learn and have a lot smaller egos than the men. the men do seem better at solving problems though, even if they do do it horribly.
I put in good comments and write nice clean code with lots of documentation unit tests etc... I'm not a woman and I'm the only person in the department that does this women included. I also do all the training so it's quite possible that the women will start to do this just because of their willingness to learn and their lack of ego.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
bias, anyone?
It's easy to see where this writer can get this impression, seriously IDK about YOUR environment but the last time I saw a women write code was in college as part of a mandated computer class. I can easily imagine that the reason the writer sees a 'trend' is because programming is (to the point of frustration) still very much a male dominated world and the only women the go into it are the ones who are interested in the subject enough to do it right. I think we would be lying to our selves if we ignored the "nerd factor" in all of this. This is a generalization people, there will always be exceptions and given how many programmers are foreign and don't necessarily have the communication skills that someone in a 1st or 2nd world country would I am not surprised by this result.
Just in from the department of made up facts and statistics.
You're just begging to be rickrolled to a NSFW hermaphrodite pron site with curiosity like that.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
I have lots of coders reporting to me. You can't judge the sex, race, age, sexual orientation, etc of the coder from the quality of the code.
Enough with the sexist and discussion provoking (read: flamebait) stories already.
Any programmer (whether male or female) who 'try to obfuscate things in the code' are on a fast tract to sacked-ville, and ignored-for-promotion town.
http://www.zombieapocalypse.tv/
I write PERL like a man, and for a damn good reason. Have you ever tried to get written instructions from a woman? Well, since my wife wrote the instructions for everyone to get to our first few parties, I've been damned happy with how PERL is written, and proud to document my code like a man. I've seen some PERL written like her directions, but not much.
Did I tell you, I directed most people via phone, up to 30 minutes after they gave up using her written directions.
Sure, women have a different way. In my experience, that is rarely the best, most concise, most efficient way of doing something.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Because if the Wall Street Journal put ANY story out that even insinuated that women were less than the epitome of all that is good and right in the world, their offices would be firebombed.
Now that I've lived to see this day,
These are the things I must but say.
Die a bachelor, if your options are few,
Never ever love a female programmer,
they'll make a program out of you.
Don't laugh it away, mine has been an object lesson,
They find syntax errors, even in a romantic expression.
Alas! They search logic in love, where there is none,
Your heart may skip a beat and they just hit return.
You are in for trouble if you persist,
You'll just be a pointer in her long linked list.
--
Free Playstation 3, XBox 360 and Nintendo Wii
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
I'm so tired of this stupid studies. So if we say "men code better than women do" then it's clearly a chauvinist article that makes unfair or unclear comparisons and undermine females and blah blah blah...
... or those chapters of Family Matters when men always mess up ... Well I'm tired of this.
... but you see ... "PEOPLE"
But if the article says "women code better than men" then everything is ok. Is like some spot by Boss (at least in Spain) where the woman could replace the man if he wasn't able to use the stove or the washer
I think coding is about the person not about the gender. Careful people comment more and make more comments while rush people may make more cryptic code. Sometimes some brilliant people just don't comment but makes the most elegant code
* Explain your intent, then write your code.
This goes beyond just "put comments in your code." When you want to write a routine, or a program, start by describing the problem in natural human terms. One good approach is to open a new text file, write the problem description in English (etc.), but put comment/remark syntax markers around it. For each sentence in the problem description, you can often insert the real programming code necessary, and leave the English description behind.
Adding translations and comments for every line of code, to explain every single operation, is not effective documentation. Instead, write your intentions for how the routine should work in English, and follow it with several lines of code. Put strategy in comments, tactics in code. This will help you write code cleanly and logically the first time, and it will help your associates decypher the program later. Commenting code shouldn't waste time, it should save time.
If they wrote "// walk the array of customers" (above the loop) instead of "// increment i from 0 to j in increments of one", wouldn't that help you follow the chain of thought so much more? Of course, literate programming would rather you use variable names that conveyed their intent as well.
[
Of course, I don't think this is 100% gender related, because the female programmers that act like the stereotypical programmers also kinda suck at work too. I think it's more of an issue of having people skills and my anecdotal evidence supports hiring more female programmers.
Damn straight!
The worst pile of spaghetti code I've ever seen was cobbled together by two women "programmers". Single character variable names, 1000+ line functions. The application was discarded and properly _engineered_ and documented by male software engineers. Female programmers... yea, tell me another one.
Sexism aside, that article reads like a want-ad. Seems to me like Ingres is in desperate need of more estrogen, and that lone female coder has grown tired of chatting up the HR bimbos.
If women write better code, does that mean we shouldn't hire bulldykes ? Talk amongst yourselves!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Any such broad classifications such as this should be taken with a *lot* of salt.
Pun intended? (I hope!)
Didn't Larry Summers get run out of Harvard for saying very similar things?
Hate to burst your bubble, but I get the same thing with my male and female co workers. It's called team work.
Notice: The indentation and/or formation was NOT lost during this post, it is completely ABSENT!
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procedure TDenZazn_f.DenzExecute(i_poby: integer);
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begin
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Denz
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denz.ShowError:=true;
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vita.ShowError:=true;
showmodal;
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Does this explain the state of affairs in concurrent programming?
Bah! I can think of three female programmers immediately who I've worked with closely enough to comment on their code. Two of them were C++ programmers and I don't remember their code being anything atypical in terms of comments, though one wrote very elegant code. The third works primarily in Java and somehow manages to turn out hideously unreadable code. Conversely, I've seen numerous men who program in a variety of ways, readable and otherwise.
It's now well established that the human brain builds negative stereotypes more easily than positive ones and that people see what they are expecting and apply a double standard. This person sees what she wants to see.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Not worse, nor better really, just ... different
So yes, I can see women writing 'better' code, but I still think that's more likely to be a matter of training and discipline, as much as anything else. Or perhaps the 'female geek' effect - in a word where you'll be faced with massive prejudice and pressure, the 'female techy' is typically (and yes, I realise this is a broad generalisation) even more hardcore than male counterparts - simply because she's there because she _really_ wants to, and has had to face a lot of uphill struggle to get there. This seems to hold true in petrolhead circles too (see, I can do car analogies too) - the few 'girl racers' I've met, have extremely extreme car mods, and rigs, because they're competing against everyone else _and_ the gender stereotype.
rather a classification of broads
Trying to say it's got something to do with gender is a meaningless generalization unless the author shows us the proof. Pointless and offensive at the same time. Try these substitutions for size:
"Pandas comment better than Gnomes at coding". (I guess it's cos pandas take time to think. Gnomes are just to fast for their own good.)
"Short people code better on average than tall people" (Presumably because their heads are closer to the computer?)
"Hispanics code differently to black people." (I have no idea what I can say about this comparison that won't sound racist, and the point of this comment is to show how STUPID any general comparisons like this are.)
On the other hand, maybe these would be valid comparisons:
"Managers write worse code than developers". Yep, it might come as a shock that on average people who practice are better.
"Good developers comment more than bad developers." Shock! Horror! There's a surprise!
And while I'm at it. The picture that the WSJ used to illustrate their article shows a dramatic lack of imagination. Next time let's have a pictures of a naked coders instead of a half-assed, inappropriate, royalty-free attempt to use a bit of beauty into an otherwise daft article.
Apart from the sample size being way too low to say anything this broad, there's also other factors that haven't been taken into account, such as that it takes a special kind of woman to make it into such a male-dominated field, which may reflect on how well they do their job.
What I've noticed is a tendency I've seen for female programmers to be assigned "soft" tasks like documenting and translating. I've seen that in two very different workplaces, I get the (gut) feeling that it's in an attempt to "protect" the women. Stupid. That's exactly what doesn't get more women into programming.
I agree with the sexist statement. We all know that women and a lot of men think that men are lazy disgusting troglodytes, but I have known some women who were far more lazy and disgusting...for example, I had a girl friend who was so lazy and disgusting, rather than get up out of bed to take her morning wiz, she would grab the "Big Gulp" cup from the bed side table and piss in it...now I know that is disgusting!, I was there and seen it.
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
I've encountered good and bad coders of all genders but I have noticed that they tend to be motivated by different factors. Male programmers are motivated by proving their ability to their peers. Female programmers tend to be motivated more by praise from their superiors. There are of course exceptions to both cases; I don't particularly feel like I have anything to prove to my co-workers myself, but a lot of programmers do, especially young guys.
As an additional dimension to this question:
I'm a gay man, and I've been told that my code is unusually clear. I think of my code as a letter that I'm writing to the next person who has to work with it. (Frankly, I consider clarity in code to be a measure of the competence of the programmer.)
Obviously, a pattern can't be drawn from one individual. However, if there's any validity to the claim about a difference in coding styles between the male and female populations, I wonder whether gay men tend to pattern one way or the other.
Hey look, you can read Miss McGrattan's own blog entry about the interview and perhaps provide some intelligent, constructive comments. Remember not to obfuscate!
We all know that even if a woman *appears* to document her code well that what is written isn't what she really means!
Or women don't document at all and just expect the men to know what they are thinking.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
So you hit it!?
Feeling insecure chaps? (The parent post too). Pathetic.
"(probably only 10% of the class was female)?
10%? lucky bastard.
I don't know what it was (the tone, perhaps), but this post made me crack the fuck up.
If women code anything like they act in real life, then you'd get a lot of helpful comments like this:
/*If you don't why this function isn't returning your expected result, then hell if I'm going to tell you.
I have anecdotal evidence that indicate the opposite is true but I don't claim my anecdotes are indicative of the whole of the human race (or the coder subset of it)
I have ever had the pleasure to work on was written by a woman who also happened to be legally blind.
This was Cobol code. All of her programs were well commented, laid out sensibly, and very easy to work on.
The only thing I've noticed between the two is females tends to use more descriptive and longer variables names.
Male:
int iBlobPermBF;
Female:
int iBinaryBitFieldForPermissions;
Not only that, but even if the observation (that women write better documented code than men) is true, that would only be a correlation. The gender itself is not causation - if you want to learn something meaningful, find out why the gender is correlated (e.g. women at that company are given more reasonable deadlines, men feel less secure in their positions so they don't care about helping others untangle the 'spaghetti').
Be careful of your thoughts; they could become words at any minute...
One, I have a rule I teach to any programmer under my supervision: strategy in comments, tactics in code. Tactics are what you do to get something done. Strategy explains what you want done. In warfare, an officer focuses on strategy: "secure that hill!" "pick the best two devices!" "find the local minimum!" Don't mention the tools you use to get that job done, soldier, unless you're being fiendishly clever. Comments should be in natural human language, while the code should just accomplish those tasks.
Two, I have a technique I teach to any new programmer, whether they're under my supervision or not: write the comments first. Programming courses always talk about writing pseudocode: why write it on scratch paper, just to throw it away?
(Pardon the cruddy indentation. Thanks to slashdot's weak formatting features.)
Once the pseudocode is written in human terms, then fill in your actual code in whatever computer language is being employed. Note that I didn't say HOW to do each of the tasks in the comments. I just wrote what needed to get done.
Lastly, as others have indicated, the actual code should not be too clever for your teammates to understand at a glance. Use clear concise words for variable names, without abbreviating them unnecessarily. Use the idioms they're familiar with. Use the language they're familiar with. You shouldn't need any # swap $x and $y comments to explain basic tasks or idioms. If you really find a clever but unusual trick, or you need to hack out something that's not obvious, then you can mention it.
I have configured my editors to highlight tags like #REVIEW: #TODO: #BUGBUG: #HACK: so I can see areas that need more attention. Review things which may or may not be right or done in the best way. List things that are definitely undone but needed. Mark areas where known bugs are located, even if the fix isn't in there yet; give bug tracking numbers if appropriate. Mark code which is overly clever to get around dumb library limitations or which save a lot of processing in obscure ways.
[
However usually it doesnt increment at all, as most variables default to zero/false
I have my own crack theory. :) In the I.T. field, men greatly outnumber women. The women that decide to work on I.T. are usually intuitive thinkers that don't easily get pressured into accepting the gender roles assigned to them by society (i.e., programming is a man's job).
In general, sensate thinkers (ST) greatly outnumber intuitive thinkers (NT). When someone thinks of "male programmers", they are actually thinking of "male ST programmers" that like to show how clever they are by writing cryptic code.
The NT programmers that I've worked with try to show off by explaining the concepts behind the code through comments and diagrams, which is often a good thing.
No.
Star Ratings by Leah Culver:
# round to one decimal place and
# separate into whole and fractional parts
parts = str(round(star_sum/num_raters, 1)).split('.')
whole = int(parts[0])
frac = int(parts[1])
if frac 7:
___frac = 0
___whole += 1
else:
___frac = 5
# recombine for a star rating rounded to the half
stars = float(str(whole)+'.'+str(frac))
Expert Django web developer at work!
Basic sexist statement template:
"Because of (stereotype) everything that (gender A) does is good, and everything that (gender B) does is bad."
Note that some combinations of parameters will be rejected by the compiler as obviously buggy, others will be silently accepted.
One of the better programmers I ever knew was a woman, and also one of the worst. The better one didn't even indent her 'if' statements, much less add comments until I shouted at her and made her review something she had written a few months earlier. The other one, wrote more comments than code... Like she thought she could justify the fact that it didn't work by explaining what it was supposed to do.
Pretty much kills that theory in my book. Men and women often think differently, and even different programmers of the same sex think differently. There are a lot of generalizations one can make about women and men in the world, and argue religiously about whether it is environment or instinct... Somehow I don't think programming style is one of them.
So in other words men know how to make them invaluable where as the woman are easily replaced
I work on the assumption that the next person to read the code will have at least a vague idea of what the programming language is, and how to speak it, so comments are the subtext to explain what happens, where, and where any obfuscations are. (Deliberately obfuscating is bad; occasionally it's unavoidable, and therefore needs more comment)
Who said women couldn't code?
Cogito, ergo sig.
I think this is a stereotype like any other. You can't say that one group of people always does something in a given way.
I certainly do not write my code in a "cryptic way" to show off. I find it a little insulting to my entire gender to be pigeonholed in that way.
I was taught that when you write code it should be easily understandable and well commented and that's what I do.
Sheesh.
Greg C.
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
but there's one thing not mentioned....for example.
Next to me, there's the hottest girl programming some VBA app. Talk about the manifestation of heaven & hell together, but I digress; the point really is, all the guy programmers come over to "help her out", literally whenever they can - blatantly, just to stare down her top. _She_ might be more productive, but I guarantee the rest of the male population of our department isn't.
Even I, I must admit, have dived under her desk just once to check her "power cables were all in place" after one power-cut. Yeah I'm not sure what I was thinking with that reasoning either, but she bought it (did I mention she programs VBA?).
It is a sad day when a grown man combines his sexual fantasy into a coding discussion I know. I'll go now.
throw new NoSignatureException();
See, that's how to troll. It's all about subtlety.
Nah, I've just come to hate women. Personal reasons.
but i do know that wildly speculative sweeping generalizations provides lots of fodder for utterly useless watercooler chit chat
congrats slashdot for picking a topic everyone feels entitled to comment on and absolutely no one actually says anything useful on
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Does this mean you need to spend half an hour telling the database how pretty it is and how much you love it no matter what it says before it will give you a straight answer?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
So when are we going to get an HTML compiler, so men and women are stopped from stealing my beautiful web page code?
How would it be any different if I said women aren't as good at math as men?
This is plain old sexism and I resent it.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
"...and don't leave clear directions for people using it later."
It's called job security.
Also: I hear that Asians write really efficient code because of their little fingers. And black guys? They could write great code, if only Whitey would stop keeping them down.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
...because i++ is somehow obfuscated?
A Venn diagram of programming languages would reveal substantial overlap.
So, RTFM, and use the tool at hand as intended.
And, no, I'm not recommending a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_golf#Perl_golf or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOCCC, I'm talking about knowing the tool and taking a common-sense approach. If 80% of the people can read increment/decrement, eliminate excrement and use them, say I.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Perl? Pfft. Real men code in INTERCAL.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
This "article" itself deserves to be flagged flamebait.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
I think Indians are twice as evil as just men when it comes to obfuscated code. It is part of their sinister plan to take over the IT industry. They write their comments in Hindi.
And women write code the way they decorate a house, they move the furniture a lot, trying to find the "perfect" spot. Maybe that explains the Ingres market share: too much time spent moving the furniture.
saddam hussein gassed his own people!! would a woman do that?!
good-bye karma!
But I can still write my name in the snow better than any woman.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Yeah, been there, wrote my share of spaghetti code to tack on another feature the quickest and least elegant way.
Now add a management that is not willing to invest in refactoring during slower times, and the code will degrade over the years as one quickhack is added to the next.
C - the footgun of programming languages
"The senior vice-president of engineering for computer-database company Ingres-and one of Silicon Valley's highest-ranking female programmers-insists that men and women write code differently"
That there is a difference I could buy. But that the difference is so easily stereotyped in the way she describes I find a little hard to believe. In fact, were this a man talking about the "difference" in the same way, I'm sure they would be in enormous trouble for offering such a blatantly sexist anecdote. I'm a little surprised that someone with such an attitude has a management position and is so bold about stating their prejudices. I'm all for getting as many women in coding jobs as are interested and are skilled at it, but I'd think twice about working at a place where someone in charge has such obvious gender biases.
Improve coding practices by requiring better documentation and setting standards? Great idea. Attribute existing differences in those practices to gender? Sounds like foolishness unless she's got some kind of scientific study to statistically back it up.
Sure, men and women think differently, but perhaps the answer is even simpler. Look around your average IT shop, and it's pretty plain that there are a lot more men there than there are women.
Perhaps it's just that for men, IT's a reasonable and expected field to go into, but for women, it's not as much, so a woman going into IT is much more likely to be well-suited for it and better at it?
It might have very little to do at all with the difference in thought processes between men and women.
very neat and with lot of comments!
does that mean i am gay?
this article is bs - i
And then you have women like the brillant Paula.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Actually, this article is almost completely fallacious... Let's look at the facts quoted:
McGrattan boasts that 70% to 80% of the time, she can look at a chunk of computer code and tell if it was written by a man or a woman.
...at Ingres because only about 20% of the engineers are women, McGrattan says. (Most of them are in jobs involving quality assurance or adapting the product to a new locale, she says, and not the "heavy lifting" of writing code.)So, basically, she'd get a higher score if she guessed "man" every time than if she tries to be clever. Clearly, then, she does think some men's code looks like it's been written by a woman, which invalidates to point of the article.
Do Chinamen write better code?
Hard working good at math.
I'll just point out that women are bad at math.
This is pure misandry.
First, Perl is not an acronym, see the FAQ. Second, there have been studies [JFGI] that show that women give directions differently. Men use spatial reasoning (go north 5 miles), women use procedural methods (turn right at the bargain outlet).
Even if this statement is true, which I'm certainly not saying it is, in my experience women are also far more likely to clash with each other. We used to have a single woman programmer in our development department, and everything went smooth. She would make her points, most of the men would usually gang up on her and explain the opposite, it'd be one big fun-fest. About 20 minutes later, a major breakthrough would be achieved where both parties are happy.
Another woman works here now. IF they finish arguing in an hour, it's not because they've come to a conclusion, it's because their throats are sore. They still can't even decide on some simple coding standards that the rest of us have already just been sort of using.
Women together generally makes for a bad experience.
These are just things I've noted, nothing sexist about it.
:(){
What's she doing out of the kitchen in the first place?
...then again, we hired a woman to program (as an intern) and she ended up preferring to write documentation, which she enjoyed a lot more than programming, and trust me, we were more than happy with that situation. We had a veteran programmer who was a woman and she wrote hardcore C (ex physicist) and didn't comment much.
I comment my code profusely and stick notes about "why" (not "what") all over the place, and I'm a guy.
I think the OP is generalizing way too much. The point of my post is that everyone is different, not just because they are men and women. Women can be just as elitist as guys and write clever code that runs as efficiently as possible (in other words, can be a little hard to understand) then assume that anyone following them should know what they are doing so not comment much. It can look obfuscated but sometimes to get max performance that's how things turn out.
Tell me something new... admittedly I have to push myself to comment, but in my old age it's coming a lot more naturally. Everyone is different and sex has little to do with it.
-Viz
It's in the title of the article:
1. Observe an apparent difference in efficiency between two groups of people, based on anecdotal evidence.
2. Write a management book: "Touchy-feely Code Monkeys". Optionally, talk around the country.
3. Cash in
Dawkins Revisited: A person is shit's way of making more shit -- Steve Barnett, anthropologist.
AAUGH! I CODE LIKE A GIRL!
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
>for (unsigned int i=0;ij;i = i + 1)
This loop starts at zero and keeps incrementing by one as long as the variable ij is non-zero. Your male colleague is an idiot. there probably was a < between the ij which was probably removed by the html encoding or something. just a guess
...of the sample. Since there are much more male programmers and assuming the probability of finding a good programmer is smaller then finding a bad ou average one, the expected male code will be more likely to be average than the female one.
:)
Oh, I'm also assuming that the more obfuscated the code the worse it is, wich I personally don't agree very much
Badass Resumes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huda_Salih_Mahdi_Ammash
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'd probably try to obfuscate the hell out of it...
Back in our days of undergrad we gathered up a group of women and men from various disciplines on campus that were said to be good developers to participate in a double-blind experiment where results of model building vs. console coding were compared. The tasks presented could be accomplished from using visual shape models and from console development. The results were obvious. Women were always more successful than men using models. Men were always more successful on the console with the cursor. Thinking about it women are more visual creatures (literally, men are typically less adept to colors, in fact most men have some color blindness as we know). With an array of shapes of many colors the women were able to adapt quickly and build out even the most complex models with ease. I believe the results were published.
As a male who likes to leave lots of "roadmaps" and such in my code for future programmers, I feel that my masculinity has been challenged.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
I'm all for it. This college student wouldn't mind more than an average of three girls in his computer science classes.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso
I apparently code like a woman too. More so than the female engineers on the team (50% at my company) or anyone else I have ever met.
.. haven't _ever_ worked with a woman programmer in my 10+ year career.
That's a bad thing.
However, compensating by ascribing generic traits to gender (tidyness, empathy, etc) is not going to help, and IMHO this is exactly what this VP does.
I'm glad I don't work for her. She seems quite sexist.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
Anyone with spare time at work and a sense of duty will spend that spare time throwing in extra comments and writing up lengthy documentation to boot. I don't know about you, but in all the jobs I've worked, deadlines result in minimal code comments and even less documentation. I'm a big documentation advocate, but even I can be found cutting corners when the rubber meets the road.
This observation by so-call VP may have overlooked sexism. Perhaps the real problem is that men treat women like little children in the work place. Like saying, "Step aside little lady. Let the men handle this heavy lifting(coding)." If that age-old analogy still rings true (which it still does in many situations) then perhaps male programmers are taking on the bulk of the work and giving female programmers smaller or fewer projects to fill their time. I could totally see that happening and it would completely explain things. Perhaps men are even trying to show off to the ladies by seeing how obfuscated their code can be to complete a task ("Check out my programming muscles"). Then again, women are fans of beautifying, so perhaps comments are like flowers.
That woman needs to have her head examined. I just (thankfully) finished working on a small team that included a woman, and she was THE most ignorant, illiterate, incompetent, clueless, arrogant, lazy, backstabbing, lying, trash talking, rude, and cheating sack of slime IMAGINABLE . . . Yet will I assert that this applies across the board to women? NO Only a sexist idiot would do that.
SARAVA!
"American" sexism? You totally had me until you qualified sexism as "American." Why are you being nationalistic in a post decrying sexism? Are you replacing one bias for another?
A more interesting comparison would be programmers who come from math/science/cs backgrounds vs. those who come from humanities backgrounds. I'm guessing that mathy kinds of folks like their stuff real terse and uncommented and try to syntactically write as few lines as possible, whereas the english/psych majors probably comment the living hell out of their code and aren't afraid to use lots of extra lines to do stuff.
Female code is more sensitive to errors and user input. They react, but often in ways unexpected, and there is a lot more going on than the users are made aware of.
There are also more dialogs, but most of them are just confirmations, with no option to cancel. Sometimes users are forced to read instructions or show concern for the programs wellbeing before being able to proceed.
Female code is also shorter and lighter, more often mutli-threaded, and tends to be harder to debug.
Female software tends to lock-in users with very strict and specific End User License Agreements. You also lose half of your harddrive if you switch to another program, or are caught making out in another window.
And so on and so forth.
Women and Men DO think different. The men are evil and women rock tone of this article however is pathetic as are her conclusions.
However you could leverage the fact that men and women think different to gain fault tolerance. If you have two independent programmers do the same work, with the same requirements they will frequently arrive at different solutions. As most know this can be leveraged by comparing the output of both solutions to verify the solution is proper. If one solution was done by a male and the other by a female the probability of difference should go up due to the difference in thought patterns, I would think.
That is a real chance of benefit versus the male hating nonsense she spewed.
I've always lived by the rule that there are three options when it comes to programming:
1. Cheap
2. Fast
3. Correct
You can choose any two options when developing something. Guess which two my clients usually make?
Regarding this, I agree - flamebait, article - I've only ever worked with one other female coder. Her code was the sloppiest thing I've ever gone cross-eyed staring at. Usually that doesn't matter to the clients much as long as it works, her code didn't even work half the time. With 0 lines of documentation 2 out of the 3 projects I worked with her on I ended up completely redoing her responsibilities myself.
Do I judge all women coders by her standard? No I'm not that ignorant.
*DrugCheese rants*
I can do that even without looking at the code! I'm willing to bet that 70-80% of the code is written by men (just by the sheer ratio of male to female engineers). If I always guess that a man wrote it, I can do it WITHOUT looking at the code.
> Bah! I can think of three female programmers immediately
Ah, lucky man...
So when told that you code like a girl the proper answer is Thank you?
Yes I'm one of those people that like to write many short instructions and I comment on nearly everything. My philosophy has always been that I should understand what the hell I did even after being hit over the head. So some comments become very obvious and the d'oh factor is sometimes quite high.
I don't think either men or women are better at engineering, but there are just plain fewer women in these fields and they tend to be very competent, in my experience. More wheat; less chaff.
This brings me back to my first post college job. It was 1991 and the guy sitting next to me had a picture of Paula Abdul as his desktop background. Someone complained to HR and he was asked to remove it.
At the same time my boss who was also his boss had an anatomical poster "Penises of the Animal Kingdom" on her wall with to scale anatomical drawings of about 10 different species penises - including homo sapien. HR never asked her to remove it, and she was in a position of authority.
Never really bothered me, but did show me that sexism and sexual harassment rules are applied differently to men than to women.
ORLY now. I'm still officially a man (much to my chagrin), and I've always used landmarks to give directions.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
As requested, here is your NSFW pron site.
Don't thank me. I do it for the people!
blah blah blah
If you want to be really pedantic, in C, and this sure looks like C, most variables default to undefined and it wouldn't compile. Did you learn to program in Excel?? (I kid, I kid).
Just trying to be of service: Nobody cares if your puns were intended.
Never heard of Perl. Is she your girlfriend ?
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=puns
Of course its all crap, but just remember, that if women want to start with the sexism crap, the last time that we did that, women cooked and cleaned for 20,000 years. Hey lady, I'm getting hungry.
Sure, women might be more considerate and write better documentation and pay attention to a corporate process more, but that's all maintenance work. At some point, somebody has to sit down and actually write the first instance of Unix, DOS, Windows, C, C++, Java, SQL Server, Oracle, Netware, or any other system, and we have to ask, where's the one that a woman wrote?
See, I think there is another stereotype, is that, there is a subset of men that are iconoclastic tinkers. Men don't express themselves, often, in speech, and self actualize themselves more based on what they build or make rather than how they appear or communicate. Sexual competitive pressures matter too. Men -MUST- differentiate, or they cannot further their genetic destiny through breeding.
So, its more likely that a man's going to be inventive and do something like it. It's evolutionary more sound, and backed by current knowledge.
This is my sig.
nt
While this may be true of beginning programmers, I don't think anyone with experience, either male or female has any misconceptions about the value of well documented code. If these tendencies do exist in men and women, I'm sure they are quickly experienced out. However, I bet there are other areas of coding aside from comments and clarity that men and women have different natural tendencies on. Like when to class something and when not to. But I'm just guessing.
Men's standards. Link
maybe women do write more readable code, but that might be only because they are more relaxed in their environment. put a female coder in a team full of males and at least subconsciously they are gonna try and keep her around. she doesn't feel the need to prove herself because she is alreadya female programmer, she's miles ahead of other women in the field already. men are more likely to feel that they should need to write impressive code so they can keep their jobs. as a manager if you had to lay someone off, who would it be? if you fire the women you risk a lawsuit if you fire the guy who writes tricky code you lose productivity as everyone else tries to translate his stuff and you run the risk of losing a truly competitive and creative genius (though he may just be an ass-hat that writes badly documented code), or would you lay-off the guy who writes simple text-book code and makes it well documented so anyone else on your team can maintain his code with minimal loss in productivity. not the above question is different from a manager trying to hire someone, it is wiser to hire the guy who writes good code over the guy who writes unreadable code.
...because I've never read code written by a woman. If I had, perhaps I was unaware of it. But if stereotypes have any basis in fact, then women are more likely to comment their code and arrange it better. It's just the way women are.
On the other hand, I know few coders in general, but I do know there are quite a few men in IT who hide what they know and, more significantly, what they don't know. What they don't know is viewed, by them, as a weakness and men don't like to show their weaknesses. Frankly, I'm very annoyed by those people, especially when it leads to exaggeration or deceit about what they actually know. I don't lie on my resume. On the other hand, I have seen people who were clearly not skilled or qualified to do certain things win very nice positions through lies and misrepresentation. Hiding what you know or don't know is just another form of dishonesty as far as I'm concerned. IT is another science and masculine posturing should have no part in it. It's ridiculous and counter-productive. Frankly, it sickens me.
There are lots of people who know less than I do. I'm willing to teach what I know at the drop of a hat. There are lots of people who know a lot more than I do and I hope for the chance to learn from them. I just can't see knowledge in any other light.
Anyone who assigns attributes to half of the people in the world is on very thin ice.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
So so I. Turn right at the White Swan, left at the King's Arms and if you reach The Frog & Ferret you've gone too far.
Of course thse landmarks tend to be a bit more static and longer lasting than the red Ford van and the crazy homeless guy - I've been given directins like that before.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Yeah right, like a woman could manage to construct a firebomb! They'be get distracted by Macey's or somewhere on the way to Wall Street[1] anyway.
[1] Assuming the WSJ is based on WS....
And where the hell has the option to use the old reply method gone?
The real problem is that there are too many programmers that can kinda write code, but really can't read it. They see all the little pieces but can't build a progressively more abstract picture in their heads as to what the program is doing. I guess, ultimately, you have to ask, if they can't do that, then, why are the programming?
This is my sig.
> Silicon Valley's highest-ranking female programmers
[Citation needed]
highest ranking as what? who's on top? what's my ranking? shit, i need to level, wtf?
----
Personally, I reckon there was probably a < and a > It would certainly make more sense..
The code is occasionally obscure, e.g., strftime(sfmt,2047,argc>ckprm?&(argv[ckprm][1]):"%a %b %e %H:%M:%S %Z %Y",&tm); but that happens more because I'm a terse coder than because I'm trying to be obscure.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Actually dated one of them. Well one and a half of them, kind of...
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
stay away!
I have cleaned up and maintained programs from literally hundreds of other programmers.
I have not noticed any sexual bias for bad code. Some people have it and some people do not. I see tons of unneeded and often unused variable with poor names. Databases with numeric fields where text should be and vice versa. Platform or vendor specific techniques where generic ones will do just as well.
Oh yeah, I have seen the deliberate obfuscation. (Ranjeev Dolas where are you?) Splicing assembly code into a 4GL Informix program to make it say "Is the third octet = 192?". It is not hard to see when people have deliberately made things hard for others to figure out, probably all for job security.
Me on the other hand, I know that I will probably be the fool that has to come back to this code later and fix it again. So I add comments to the things I can figure out and even to the things I cannot. Put comments and dates around my fixes. After a while the code starts to look like my own.
My poor code comes from my throw-away programs. The kind you write once to solve a problem today. You run the code once and never expect to touch the code again. Except next month, a really similar tool is needed. Now I go back to my old code, if I can find it, and OMG it looks like a freaking third grade did it with construction paper and crayons. This is my biggest downfall.
- I live the greatest adventure anyone could possibly desire. - Tosk the Hunted
I have to find a workplace with 99% women.
:-P
Should make for instant morale boosting every time I lift my head from code
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.
I am a man. My code has significantly more lines of documentation than actual code. I must be a woman.
Are you saying one of them was a tranny?
That comment reminds me of of this Sony advert
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Before one can make any statement like "X writes better code than Y", one must define what constitutes "better" in this case.
If I were a racing car driver, "better" would probably mean "faster", but things are a little more complex in the computer world.
For example, one might be writing code to be embedded in a device with minimal memory. "Better" might then mean "using less ROM/RAM".
Or the code might be used to control some equipment at CERN (where I imagine the demand for speed is high). "Better" would in this sense mean code that executes faster.
Or one might be writing a book on the subject of programming. It would be reasonable, then, to assume that "better" means code that with more clarity than other code illustrates how to use the language/algorithm in question.
Only when you have defined what constitues "better" code can you single out any individual or group as writing better code than others.
Having said the above I think it is quite possible that women write "better" code than men, but I would not state it as a fact without a good survey and strict definition of "better".
This is purely anecdotal, and I'm going to post anonymously at that.
Of the three women programmers that have worked for us in the past ten years, two wrote code that barely worked in production. In one case, one of them faked the code through conformance testing and then quit a week before the code was to go into live production. In both cases the code was illegible, did evil things with pointers, bypassed protect/private blocks for no apparent reason, and copy-pasted thousands of lines of code rather than refactor. The developers who had to maintain and ultimately replace the code written by these two programmers now describe broken code in terms of "A" type code and "B" type code (mnemonics substituted for real initials).
"A" type damage: five thousand lines of code, one function, six levels of nesting, the same repeated sequences. This is also known as "afraid of functions."
"B" type damage: manipulating and maintaining data in globals, with complex boolean flags to manage flow control, and the frequent use of strings to hold data best held by classes or structures. This is called "afraid of data."
The third developer lasted two months before she found a programming job in a less-stressful industry segment; it was not possible to analyze her code as she had not written any that made it to source control before leaving.
If this sounds like a rant, it is. My team ate the brunt of that, and whereas I can call my teammates out for bad code, no one dared call out A. or B. as one had seniority and the other thought she was god's gift to programming and dropped threats of a lawsuit whenever someone provoked her.
-Not Impressed
Don't know about that.. Your assuming that the top 2.5% are what goes into engineering instead of just whatever 2.5% are motivated to try.
I've seen some Chinese families push their daughters into programming with somewhat disastrous results. I've also seen some smart girls not even try because the guys they are into don't think smart girls are cute.
I tend to think we lose both on the good and the bad when they don't try at all.
Of course thse landmarks tend to be a bit more static and longer lasting than the red Ford van and the crazy homeless guy - I've been given directins like that before.
One of the standard jokes here in the Boston (Massachusetts, USA) area is about getting directions from a native Bostonian, including things like "turn right where X used to be", where X is something that long-time residents will know about. I'd lived here only about a month when I first got directions like this. It was from a man, FWIW; I've since gotten equally bad directions from both men and women.
I've learned to try to get an actual address, but it's surprising how difficult that can be. Nowadays street addresses are especially useful, since I have a GPS gadget that understands them. But it can still be very difficult to extract addresses from the natives, even for places like their own house where you'd think they'd know the address.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Blazing Spiders
> Well one and a half of them, kind of...
She was that fat, ey?
hmm...sadly this article suggest that I am no woman (though I'm very sure I am) because I do not code at all the way she explains that women supposedly do. :o)
I cannot believe all the men with their panties in a bunch over this.
Pfft. No wonder we geeks have such problems with the opposite sex.
Expecting straight answers from a woman...rotfl.
~ $ man woman ...
No manual entry for woman
The ''female'' style pretty much describes the style I use and teach in programming. Nothing female about it, just professional work.
I can accept that there are very likely a lot of macho-type bad programmers out there that do not understand what they are doing and want to show off. But these are bad programmers, plain and simple. I don't think there are any significant differences between good female and good male programmers. I also do not think that there are more good female programmers (relaitive to the numbers of females and males total) than male programmers. There are very likely a lot more bad male programmers in absolute numbers, since males have this tendency to choose a profession they are not good at.
Any conclusions about females being better programmers can be squarely layd down to females in programming being a small elite and males are not. Compare the best females and the best males and you will likely not find much difference, in skill, style and numbers.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Yeah I'm all for it
This MIGHT be an interesting premise for some more grounded research. I mean, most sociological studies, I assume, start with an interesting question mostly made up of what some person thought was true, and wanted to find out for sure. But it's stupid to even have this as a story, unless someone's at least done some kind of valid inquiry! How about:
For women and men working on similar tasks, under similar deadlines, what is the average length of code minus comments (because, of course, you can write a c program that's all 1 line but readable it is probably not)? Same thing, but how many comments? Give random code to literate testers and have them rate it on readability, ability to modify, etc. (blind to gender of course). etc.
I think what troubles me most about this is that she uses the (somewhat annoying to me as a woman) stereotype that women are "touchy-feely" as part of her explanation of the "better code". But hopefully most of you KNOW that not all women are that way, perhaps not even most (Meyers-Briggs would say 75%, but whatever); and moreso, that probably the women attracted to science and computing are unlikely to be "feely" with a capital F. PS. My perl code is also unreadable, and I refuse to comment because I'm a brat (actually I tell myself I'll do it at the "end" so it's complete but that never happens)... guess I'm a failure to female coders!
"sometimes he felt that his whole life was a dream, and he wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it."
I am a female programmer and I always try to write clear, well-organized code so that it's easy for others to use and modify. I think this has less to do with my gender than it has to do with the fact that I'm not a jerk to my coworkers ;)
Though I think some women in some environments are more concerned about how others perceive them becuase there can be a certain attitude (or a perceived attitude) and they want to avoid negative attention.
Sounds like this individual is sexist. Glad I don't work for her and have to deal with her discrimination!
Men really do think differently than women. Numerous studies of brain activity, using CAT and similar scanners, find that different areas of the brain are active during similar tasks. Just this week, another study was published showing that the brain activity in gay men is very similar to straight women, and that the activity in lesbian women is similar to straight men, and that brain activity in straight men is very different from straight women.
I work in a system of several million LOC, with a hundred different authors over the course of two decades. I know all of the developers, and I see the difference in the code all the time. Code written by women or gay men is much easier to read, and rarely requires maintenance to fix bugs. Code written by straight men is often uncommented, difficult to read, and requires frequent maintenance to fix bugs. (I don't think we have had any lesbian programmers.) The maintenance frequency shows up very strongly in the reports from the revision control system.
I try to make my code beautiful and clear, in addition to being correct. And verifiable theoretical correctness is better than just passing the test case. The straight men I work with don't seem to be concerned with aesthetic values or theoretical correctness. They just want it to work for the immediate test case. Then they have to work on it again, to fix bugs, usually ten or more times in the first year that the module exists.
If frequency of repair (bug fixes) is an indication of quality, straight women and gay men produce higher quality code, and the numbers prove it. It really is quicker to do it right once than to rush and then fix it later. But, to do so seems to require a different way of thinking.
Perhaps we should go out of our way to recruit women and gay men.
They'll intersperse their code-those strings of instructions that result in nifty applications and programs-with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the lines the way they did and exactly how they did it.
I see. Only women comment their code. Gimme a break.
Clear, Dark Skies
No, he's saying he 'half-dated' one of them. That means he was dating her but she wasn't actually aware of it...
Code shows, how it works, comments - how it should work, or at least, what the author meant. This might come in handy debugging.
The article goes on to say that only 20% of programmers at Ingres are female, and most of those are in QA or localization, so this strategy would work for Ingres code too.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
The first computer programmer was arguably a woman.
Perl's a singer. She stands up when she plays the piano.
Right you are,
First ye take 120 paces for'ards, then ye spin widdershins thrice times. Walk till the cockatrice calls and dig for yer treasure me hearties. Yarrr.
CF.
It's up there, just past the bush with yellow flowers that looks like a dog cocking its leg.
I'm a man, and I use named landmarks to give directions. Makes much more sense.
Being able to accept, let alone receive criticism seems more instructive to me. I have worked with both good and bad programmers of both sexes. The most atrocious ones don't last but some do hang on for a long time. What it comes down to is the more sensitive ones are more likely to persist their bad habits because the rest are afraid to comment in fear of causing grief or having the tables turned on them for other reasons.
I have found more women in my field with less of a chip on their shoulder than other minorities, even if they are of another minority group. Being open to criticism allows for improvement as it is the first sign your willing to change.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
They require programmers to include a detailed set of comments before each block of code explaining what the piece of code does and why
So they've introduced coding standards, how is this revolutionary? Wouldn't it be more appropriate to ask "How many women enjoy programming compared to men?" or "Does the lifestyle aspects of computer programming make it easier for women to have families and participate in the workforce?".
There's a big need to fix testosterone-fueled code at Ingres because only about 20% of the engineers are women
Saying code is "testosterone-fueled" is like saying emotion is logical, the language semantics either allow the behavior or they do not. I don't think computer languages care whether a man or a woman is coding and I don't remember any organisation saying that it would change it's programmatic standards because a certain group of people had difficulties understanding the code base. Your here now, learn the code base, get over it.
McGrattan boasts that 70% to 80% of the time, she can look at a chunk of computer code and tell if it was written by a man or a woman at Ingress.
All it really says is the code base at Ingress is convoluted and lacks discipline, and that their business processes to introduce new programmers to the code base is inadequate. Trying to disguise what is obviously a cultural issue at Ingress as a man VS woman issue is clearly devisive and belittles the art and science of computer programming for men AND women.
I have worked with many women programmers and I'm happy to learn from any man or woman coder that has something to offer. Coding is for people who enjoy the artful language of logic that computer languages allow us to express like poetry, and we don't judge poetry by the gender of the writer.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Sure, women have a different way. In my experience, that is rarely the best, most concise, most efficient way of doing something.
When giving directions, most men will say something like, "Turn north on Smith Street." Technically, it's correct, but most people don't know north from south.
A woman usually navigates via landmarks, such as, "turn right at the Shell station." That can also be confusing if it's *too* generic and the driver is going to be passing a lot of Shell stations. OTOH, it's often a lot easier to see and remember a landmark than a often obscured street sign. That doesn't make it more or less concise than a man's directions.
When giving directions, don't give people your special "short cut route" unless you're having to do so they can avoid construction or other major delay. Short cuts are rarely direct and it's best to have as few turns as possible even it means it's longer mileage-wise. If you write down directions to send, it's best to double check with a map as it's easy to leave out parts when it's somewhere you travel all the time. Or better yet, just Goggle a map, print it out and tuck it into the invite.
As to code, sloppy, lazy code is just that and there's no helping someone with bad habits. But if someone is trying to make it cryptic on purpose to be macho or, more likely, a feeble attempt at job security, they're an idiot. THEY may have to go back one day and rework that code and trust me, they won't remember what they were doing. I think a lot of coders don't document like they should, usually because they're under a deadline. Or they think they won't have a problem because they're working in it all the time. And they almost never go back after the project to document. But consider that, situations change, and you might find yourself changing languages, working for a year or so on another project. THEN just try and go back to ASP after being immersed into ASP.net or Perl or something else. You'll wish you'd paid more attention to documenting.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm
Women tend to gather around the average. Men tend to polarize between the genius and the retard.
It's the only always-verifiable universal truth when you compare the genders.
Maybe that's why she can hire better female programmers easier - because if you pick someone at random, you'll get more retarded males - and at the same time, the more brilliant males are ignored, since anyone about average can write easy-to-follow code pretty well.
2 possibilities:
1. Ingres has incompetent interviewers - the quality of their pick is low, and the result can be easier seen from their female hires vs their male hires (remember, if you pick randomly and only require average skills, the female candidates will be better in general)
2. Ingres does not provide challenging enough jobs for their developers. As a result, the males polarized at the brilliant side don't manifest.
I offer this more by way of commentary and observation, rather than debate. I do think there are some tasks which are better suited to either gender, but these things are rarely taken into account. Here is an example: I work in (basically) construction, and my specialty is welding. In 20 years, I have seen exactly *one* woman in this line of work. Which is unfortunate because there are some things they are damn good at. I know what my strengths are as a guy, and I'm honest about my weaknesses. Going back to coding, perhaps its just a different way of looking at things and a different way of dealing.
C|N>K
See? This is because she is *woman*. Because man will keep SQL statement outside the script in a template. Who embeds SQL statements into a source code?!! >8-E
justDoYourJob
:= Programming makeSomeLinesOfCode: 2000 withReadability: niceAndFriendly withOwner: self. := Programming makeSomeLinesOfCode: 4000 withReadability: hopelessComplexAndCrappy withOwner: self
| source |
self isWoman ifTrue: [
source
] ifFalse: [
source
].
^source
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
I tend to use both. "Take a left at the third light, it's about a half mile up the road..."
Up to 1960s or so. Military and some businesses would hire rooms of "computers", people working with mechanical calculators and graph paper. The autobiography "Surely you are joking Mr Feynman" has a segment about this. Some of these same women carried over to early vacuum-tube computers. Grace Hopper, inventor of the first widely used compiler, was of this generation.
At one of my early summer jobs in a large corporation there was a gender split between "scientists and engineers" and "programmers". The guys did write code on large "coding sheets" of paper. But the females programmed keypunched the coding sheets, submitted the job decks and collected the printouts, and the guys would analyze the printouts. You were lucky to get one or two turn-arounds a day. The new people had did their own programming on teletypes of terminals (inverted 1974) in school, so declined programming assistants. Some theold guys NEVER touched a keyboard in their careers. They were either promoted into management or laid off during the late 20th century corporate restructurings.
So early programming acquired the "taint" of effeminity and being "trade" taught in vocation school. That taint delayed computer science from becoming as degree offereing at places like MIT, Stanford, and Harvard, some untilt he 1980s. I attended all three of those schools and remember the faculty debates about this. Computer scientists hid out in other departments, typically math and electrical engineering. I guess it was when you started seeing coding superstars like Don Bricklin and Bill Gates (yes Bill wrote a legendary BASIC compiler OFF-LINE that worked within a day of finally getting the hardware) that commercial computer science became more acceptable.
I work with a woman whose name is Ruby Perle. The sad part is that the inherent pun there didn't dawn on me until just this second. I must be slipping...
668: Neighbour of the Beast
I've read plenty of interesting comments. Sorry if you're not entertained... go read something else.
So who is "entitled" to comment on this issue? Most highly-modded comments I've read have been from developers... exactly who this article was talking about.
She has obviously lost her objectivity in judging the qualifications of those who work for her.
From this point forward, any male who works for her will know that he is at a systemic disadvantage.
I wonder what the equal employment opportunity commission has to say on her gender biases in the workplace?
Giving directions and commenting your code are similar in the respect that the function of both is to explain what someone else (perhaps your future self) is doing as they try to navigate through unfamiliar territory.
There are about as many "correct" ways to do both as there are people on the planet, so this argument never goes away. I just wanted to add to your comment with this:
It does not matter that you use landmarks or directions, both are valid. When they are valid depends on the viewpoint of the interpreter of your instructions. If you use them at the wrong time... well, your instructions suck. As mentioned above about Bostonians and using non-existent landmarks.
For myself, 50 lines of code might be commented simply as
# time sensitive wrapper for the parse function
This would make sense to me, but not to others. It's the equivalent of:
It's about a mile north of the Green Man pub.
In both instances there is much about the reader that is assumed.
It truly has nothing to do with sex. It's about communication. Some people are good at communicating, others are just good at talking. They are not the same.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Programming is two parts, logic and syntax. I guess women lack logic ???
How you make such a blatant generalisation. I could also say from my experience that the reason women comment so much is that they write terrible code. But I've only known two women programmers and both have written horrible code. Neither did they comment as this person attempts to stereotype...
I think she couldn't be vp or whatever she is in any other country than iceland.
Sexual Harrassment
-fragbait
i'm not saying you aren't entitled
i'm just saying, the topic is entirely useless
here's a new topic: "who would win in a fight: batman or superman?"
now, go ahead and endlessly blather about the topic. mod people's various calculations and scenarios up as insightful
in the end, the entire topic and the entire thread is absolutely useless
not that you can't have great fun scheming and strategizing, some of the greatest topics for watercooler chit chat are essentially completely pointless
but the idea that women are better or worse coders according to incredibly broad sweeping generalizations and stereotypes is, absolutely, without any shred of doubt, completely and utterly useless and pointless
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If there are evolutionary explanations for the different distributions between genders on the curve, don't you think, maybe, there's explanations for why men produce less communicative code than women do?
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
I bet they're just full of sugar and spice too. Lemme think, one female engineer I know of, and she does try for readable code. Must be her essential femininity, her gentle nurturing nature.
Thinking of her, that cracks me up. She's nice, but I think half the male engineers are more "gentle" and "feminine" than her. Maybe it's because she came from QA.
One job, there was a page-long FAQ about how to bring down the Ingres DB. Compare and contrast with "/etc/init.d/postgresql stop".
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
I work with several female coders (embedded C stuff) and their code is on par with everyone else's code:
- Boss putting pressure to finish the feature/fix == crappy_code
- Coding with appropriate time == good and well commented code
- Ego-maniac being an a-hole == functional code that's impossible to maintain within a reasonable amount of time
These are the three categories we have regardless of gender. Why are people so obsessed with this crap anyways?
As others pointed out, blame Slashdot (and me for not using preview, I guess).
>It's good to have a healthy mix of diversity and I wish that programmers were 50/50 split on gender (trust me, I really really do) but it's not because women are better than men at coding. Prime example of American sexism in one of the few forms it exists today.
:) Sadly, i have not seen ONE female programmer.
I would like to be the only male programmer in the field
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
I have not the slightest doubt that your experience is completely true.
I had an experience like this at Hewlett-Packard in Camas, WA in 1993. I was assigned to tear apart fully-assembled printers so that the parts could be used for prototypes of the next generation. I worked alone in a room filled with printers. No one had access to this room except from me and my (supposedly) male boss.
After a few weeks, I put a close-up picture of Claudia Schiffer on the PC's wallpaper. My boss saw it and flipped out. He ordered me to remove it immediately. I said that I liked it and that no one could be offended because no one had access to the room.
A day later I was fired from Hewlett-Packard for 'creating an environment conducive to sexual harassment'. I couldn't get unemployment benefits.
To this day I hate H-P and I don't believe anything anyone says about it being an advanced or great company. I will never sign off a purchase order for any of their products for any company that I work for. I suspect that most of the so-called great companies in the electronics/computer industry are the same way.
whoosh.
> there's explanations for why men produce less communicative code than women do?
Your comment makes it sound like it's a proven fact.
Saying "men produce less communicative code thatn women do" is just as true as saying "women understand mathematics less than men do".
Either way, since when does commenting code directly correlate to how well someone codes?!
Wow, and all this time I've been cursing the database and its creators for an hour before it gives me a straight answer. This could double my productivity!
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
Ditto. :(
My code is very neat!...Just not well-commented.
int binary_search(int v[], int l,int r int x)
// x - the element we're looking for, l - leftmost index of v, r - rightmost index of v
// v - ascending order sorted vector of ints
{
return (l==r)?((v[l]==x)?l:-1):((v[(n/2)+1]==x)?((n/2)+1):((x<v[(n/2)+1])?binary_search(v,l,n/2,x):binary_search(v,(n/2)+2,r,x)));
}
there were no comments and the function name was "i". took my teacher almost two hours to see what it does. hope i got it right
mov ax,4c00h
int 21h
...how defensive all the men are getting in response to this article. I guess that this enables a feedback loop so you can go back to writing your cryptic and angry man-code.
If you really were as good as you'd like to think you are - why would you be so insecure?
Why is it always the assumption that women are the 'touchy feely' ones? Every personality test I've done (Meyers-Briggs, HDBI etc) place me firmly in the creating/feeling box (INFP in M-B).
Our IT department has a higher than usual female make-up - around 30-35%. From my experience there's no decernable difference in coding styles. On top of that, many of the women are *STJ in M-B, putting them in the more 'male' stereotype personality.
Ben
The biggest problem with "brains work differently" is that "differently" is too easily interpreted as "better". People simplify this down to a one dimensional score of IQ. No matter how you rig the scores, one group is going to come out looking "better". Then you get things like how former Harvard President Summers' speech was interpreted. And you get denial for purely political reasons, insistence that everyone is equal because otherwise it would be unfair.
Which is the better chess piece, the knight or the bishop? That's not a good question. It presumes that there's a clear advantage to one or the other when actually it's situational. The knight is regarded as better for closed positions, while the bishop is better for open positions. Nonetheless, chess experts couldn't resist concluding that perhaps the bishop is overall slightly better, and have gone as far as giving computers a blanket preference in that direction. Perhaps the bishop is the better piece for the computer's typical style of massive tactical computation paired with ever more sophisticated but insufficient heuristic rules to compensate for zero understanding of the overall strategic considerations of a chess position. (For instance, computers have been known to continue to grind out move after move in positions where the outcome is already known, positions such as king and knight vs king which is a draw no matter what the players do, because unless specifically programmed to do so, computers do not assess positions from a view of what is possible.) What I wonder is if programming is a situation in which men's or women's style of intelligence seems to work better, or is programming a more varied situation than that?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I am tired to seeing the 'women better' article in american. Looks like the media and the like is making a concerted effort to make it look like women (in US) are some superior beings and the men are just some unevolved primates fumbling along the way. Look at the normal TV ad for anything, for example.
In my professional experience in the US, I have met qualified women with brilliant minds and attitudes as mature as anyone else similar. However, I have also met a disproprotionately large (compard to other countries) number of average/mediocre women and a huge number of gatekeeper women (secretaries, admin assistants, paper pushers etc) who are best described as petty arrogant and territorial. Ever with the head in the clouds, and with an attitude that could give nightmares to any guy about PMS, and with a certain arrogance that they cannot be easily fired (thanks to easy claims of sexual harassment even by fat cows), they rule the office-america. Their only concern is being 'right' in every word they say, and will lie with abandon to gain an upperhand in any situation. Inefficient, tardy, and often affording their lifestyle only because of the man in their lives, they still go about it as if they are the ones making this world survive.
I would any day pick an excellent man or woman to work with me, but if the choice is between a mediocre man or woman, I will go for the man. I can put up with mediocrity, but not the attitude and games/lies that come with it.
> Also, here, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly the kind of thinking that encourages obfuscated code.
Explain.
It only takes average skill to write easy-to-follow code. From my admittedly anecdotal experience.
If you pick programmers at random you're likely going to see the women outputting better comments, because the difference in code quality between the brilliant coder and the average coder is not as stark as between the average coder and the bad coder.
All of these can be explained by women gathering around the average and the men spreading across the entire spectrum.
i.e. if you set your bar low, females are going to outperform males. If you set your bar high, you're going to see them even.
No, the database does not care what you think of it. It will do what you tell it to do. However, the next person working on the same code needs to know that you think he is pretty and you love him no matter what ... and that you accept and value him exactly as he is. You need to do this or he will become too distraught to even think about what you were telling the database to do previously.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
What's that '2047' ? I suppose the buffer is 2048 bytes long and you wrongly assume the terminating zero strftime writes after doesn't count there.
And why aren't you using sizeof instead of using stupid hardwired numbers ?
Why the extra parantheses around that argv thing ? because you're not sure of the operator precedence ?
Your ad here. Ask me how!
You're not getting off that easy. ;)
;)
>// Loop counts from i to j, with increments of one
Even with the less than sign, the comment is wrong. The loop runs from 0 to j-1, not from i to j.
Your male colleague is still an idiot.
I'm guessing she meant that women are more collaborative with other women. IMHO, however, if they have something to compete over, women can be just as "bad" as men in terms of the now (apparently) inherently evil attribute of "competitiveness."
Of course, maybe we could just evaluate individuals on their own merits, and classify people as "good coders" based on their actual performance instead of pre-loading biases into our expectations based on their sex, skin color, or religion. It's probably too crazy an idea to actually try, though.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
Actually dated one of them. Well one and a half of them, kind of...
Working on projects late into the evening over takeout chinese does not count as dating.
Even if you shared that single awkward sleep-deprived kiss.
or did you mean the one you dated was 400Lbs?
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
Woman says women are better than men. No news here. move on.
In other words, yak yak yak, am I right fellas? :-)
But seriously does anyone else get annoyed by "*gasp* men and women are different" stories?
WSJ published an online article relevant to /.'s target audience. Why shouldn't it be listed?
I know that her claims have no scientific basis and are downright sexist. But Slashdot is not a science-based news organization, it's a forum for geek culture.
I've seen plenty of highly-modded comments on gender in software development. Not scientific, but again, this is not a forum of science... it's a forum of culture.
McGrattan boasts that 70% to 80% of the time, she can look at a chunk of computer code and tell if it was written by a man or a woman.
:-)
I can also look at a chunk of computer code and tell you if it was written by a man of a woman. I am much better than her, I can do it right more than 90% of the time! In fact I do not even need to look at the code, the answer is: It was written by a man!
That women tend to cluster around the average for abilities may be true, but becoming a programmer requires greater than average abilities. Both men and women who are not better than average in ability will tend either to never become programmers or will be lower end programmers.
So in programming, proportionately, there will be more men and the men will tend to be better.
If programming capability has no correlation with helpfulness and if women tend to try to be more helpful than men, then the female programmers would tend to write more comments in an attempt to be more helpful, even if they are not as good at coding.
C'mon, this is a /. user we're talking about; y'gotta translate that to "I did her homework while she went on a date with her boyfriend..." ;)
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
There's a big need to fix testosterone-fueled code at Ingres
There's a big need to stamp out the bullshit myth of testosterone poisoning, perpetuated by feminists hellbent on knocking men down at every opportunity.
It's precisely why I don't support most 'feminist' causes these days; they're too busy screaming about how much goddamn better they are than men.
Please help metamoderate.
But aren't they ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Wow. This person is phenomenally stupid. She is a senior vice president of a company in California, and she is not only making derogatory comments about people based on their gender, but she is also saying that the maleness of the code needs to be fixed?!?!?!
So, basically, any man that applies for a programming job at Ingres can now sue the company for sexual discrimination if they don't get the job. Or, any male programmer that gets fired will have public statements from a senior VP on how it was done to fix the problem of having male written code. Actually, any male programmer within the company now has a sexual harassment case against Ingres.
I actually have worked with a few female programmers. One was kind of a hack who usually copied solutions from Google, and the code she wrote herself tended to be both buggy and ill-documented. She stopped programming when the .com bubble popped and that is the last I ever heard of her.
I am also working with a female programmer right now. She's a young programmer and as such makes the same sorts of mistakes that any inexperienced programmer will make, but at her level she is quite competent. Honestly though, I haven't found her code comments to be any better or any worse than those of the male programmers (including myself) that I also work with.
I have worked on old code written by male programmers with very useful coments that more-or-less fit the description provided in the article summary, and I have also worked on old code written by male programmers with no commentation at all, or utterly useless comments like "//now loop through the list...//now find the oldest value..." etc.
Ultimately my point is this....I believe that the quality and usefulness of code and code commentation will depend on the experience level, training, and natural aptitude of the coder in question. These factors will be a far greater determinant than gender.
You, sir, are a true hero. I salute you.
Whatever you do, don't answer if it asks you if those pants make it's back end look large. :-)
Ian Ameline
Giving directions should be a lesson to coders and developers in general.
....
Turn left (North) on 16th street (Starbucks on the corner)
Go 1.5 miles (about three minutes) to Broadway (Shell Station) and turn left (West)
The problem is that people tend to give directions one way, or another, but not both. Both is always better, even for those that tend to work one way better than another.
I don't mind obfuscated code, if it is well documented as to what it does. It can be more efficient way to get something done.
The some of the best coders make some of the worst documenters, because they think everyone should think like them.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
WTF? Is this the 1950s? This is a disgusting display of essentialism. Why not ask "Do blacks or chinese make better programmers than whites?" or maybe "Should women be allowed to leave the kitchen long enough to use a computer and learn to program?" It is very sad that such an educated community is still so apparently stuck in the 1950s.
I can't believe I'm the first one to say this.
Coder chicks rule!
That is all.
Spork.
P.S. Spork.
>many females have a reasonable personal preference not to be called "girl" ("chick" is also a bad choice).
They're also not wild about "love chunks," "sweet meat" or "bouncing fun bags" either...
I agree.
I've had one female programmer co-worker and her code wasn't better or worse, or even different.
New things are always on the horizon
I guess she knows her inputs and outputs.
Good to see a fellow post here.
I have only know 5 programmer women and I have only seen 2 of them coding, they are sloppy copy pasters that hardly ever write any code of their own and never comment anything.
People thought I was a cryptic programmer back in my previous job, for instance they considered:
is_overdue = movie.last_checkout() > OVERDUE_TIME
extra_points = Not is_overdue
as hackish, instead preferring the more "readable" form:
If movie.last_checkout() > OVERDUE_TIME Then
is_overdue = True
extra_points = False
Else
is_overdue = False
extra_points = True
End If
The former looks more obfuscated to me. I blame Visual Basic and brain rotage. Anyway because of that I began commenting lines as simple as.
button.enabled = !button.enabled ' toggle button visibility.
My point is, inane comments are often necessary when you are surrounded by MSCP.
But... the future refused to change.
That's what she said
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Well sure, they speak in code all the time. Makes sense they can write in code better than men.
My other sig is a knife wound.
> but becoming a programmer requires greater than average abilities.
You cannot rate "ability" in general and the put programmers somewhere.
Instead, separate the activities and then rate the population - someone bad at coding might be very good at time management, for example.
If we limit the spectrum to be just across the developers, you'll find a histogram - some good, some average, some bad.
And if you split the genders at this point, you'll find the female histogram with a higher centre and thinner tails, while the male curve with a lower centre and fatter tails.
Only if it was implemented in INTERCAL.
Does this index make me look fat?
In a previous aerospace job (we did C/C++, assembly), my technical manager, my supervisor, my lead, and my tester were all women. No, they were not from India or China either. They were just as good as anybody else there. But one important thing to note is that they were all near retirement age - this shows how software engineering was at one time more attractive to females as a career opportunity, but not so much today.
Although in all my other jobs since that one (early 2000's), all my coworkers have been overwhelmingly male.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
>Men use spatial reasoning (go north 5 miles), women use procedural methods (turn right at the bargain outlet).
How much of that is social? I would think how a girl grows up is very different from how a boy grows up. If a boy joins boy scouts, goes hunting with dad, etc then he'll see a map as something with directions and distances. If a girl doesnt get these experiences, she may never see a map until she learns how to drive and at that point has internalized her surroundings by using landmarks.
I think many of the things we write up to genetic determinism really have social roots.
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
Never mind the gender issues, I think it's funny that the entire basis for evaluating the quality of someone's code is how well-commented it is. How much documentation is the "right" amount to put in a piece of code varies *greatly* from situation to situation. A good programmer is one who knows when, where, and how much documentation is needed. Furthermore, it takes skill to make documentation useful as opposed to just redundant. The fact that this lady fails to mention these subtleties makes me think she... is not a good documenter. On another note, everyone I've ever worked with has a different style. Some are terse, some are verbose; some are straightforward, some are clever. Everyone does it their own way. The difference between men and women is that I've known enough male programmers to be absolutely convinced that they're all different, and I've known few enough female programmers that I could see being tempted to generalize about their coding styles.
This of course means I'm biased. This lady (Lesley) is the most awesome programmer I have ever met. She was able to learn a new language (C) and write a functional system in three months. This was for a completely new system which involved encryption ,telephony datacom, graphics and peripheral control (scanner and plotter). She was the sole C programmer on the project with one other assembly language programmer who wrote a scale to gray viewer for the system.
As for touchy feely code.... nope almost no comments in the code. The Assembly language programmer on the project was scared that something would happen to her and he would need to take over the code and didn't understand it at all.
She has recently gone back to college (UCF) to update her knowledge. Her group in web development class consists of 3 men and two other women. I have been conversing with some of them because we have been hosting some of the group members project pages. She is the leader of the group and so far the men and women seem even in skill so far. None of the others seem anywhere near her skill level for programming however.
That having been said, after working in the computer field since 1980 have not encountered many women. It does seem to be a GUY thing.Programming seems to be even more heavily a GUY thing as I have never seen another one of these Unicorn like mystical beasts.
Her project home page:
http://lpeterson.cet4583.cyberstreet.com/
Patent page for the above mentioned project
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5222138.PN.&OS=PN/5222138&RS=PN/5222138
Actually, to reduce anything like this to gender differences is irresponsible.
Part of the Women's Lib movement broke away from the "we support women's rights" angle and focused on the "men are not as good as us" angle, and now we have a variety of common beliefs running around that assert that men are inept at empathy, compassion, and emotional comprehension and communication. Even the great Barbara Jordan ultimately fell victim to this prejudice toward the end of her illustrious career: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/b/barbarajor370997.html
Men are as capable of seeing things from another's point of view as women, even while writing code. If anything it is the intense analytical nature of code writing that distracts ALL people from the needs and interests of other's. It has taken me 25 years to learn to comment the reasons for the code I write and not the code itself. It is a learned talent, not genetics that makes code easier to read. To make this a gender issue is deliberately inflammatory. Ms. Buckman needs to be shunned for attempting to fuel such a controversy and the WSJ booed for espousing her view. Put her back on the Street Beat for a year or so, and the WSJ next to The Enquirer in the checkout line...
My experience with women coders was a contract where there were two parts. The first part dealt with a radio interface to a time scheduler which scheduled cement trucks going out to various jobs and timings based on the type of job and time feed back from previous trips out to the jobs. The second half of the first part was getting the various recipes for the cement to be mixed.
The girls half of the job was to do a database which would track what jobs had been done and various other things. (All database work).
We had 3 months to do it in. My hard disk died 2 months in, and the backup proved to be corrupted, so I had to restart two months into the project. My half was a week overdue, but worked flawlessly.
I remember the girls doing "data flow charts" at this time, and I asked what they were doing. They replied that every project should have a data flow chart... Their half never got done, and they ended up losing the contract. (Grr).
Turns out, well commented code is an invitation to have your chair filled with someone else's ass. That's not good for long-term economic survival.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
And with regards to the article as a whole, I think it's a bit like the whole debate about which gender has the upper hand in a fight -- the woman, with her lower center of gravity, or the man, with his upper body strength? In almost all real-world cases, the relative difference between the skill of the fighters -- white-belt vs black-belt -- is going to make much more of a difference.
Same with coding. Experience, education, good habits, and innate intelligence are going to make much more of a difference in how readable the output is than who has a vagina.
Of course, I'm willing to be shown wrong: McGrattan boasts that 70% to 80% of the time, she can look at a chunk of computer code and tell if it was written by a man or a woman. It would be interesting to put that to a rigorous test. But it's difficult to take that seriously when you have things like this: Often, âoethey try to show how clever they are by writing very cryptic code,â she tells the Business Technology Blog. âoeThey try to obfuscate things in the code,â and donâ(TM)t leave clear directions for people using it later. In other words, she's trying to make this into a competitive testosterone thing. Ignoring how competitive women can be (remember high school?), this problem is easily solved by creating a culture in which elegance and clarity is valued above cleverness.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Way to miss the forest for the trees everyone.
1) 80% of software cost goes into maintenance.
2) Developers rarely stick with a position for more than 3-5 years.
It's more cost effective to have code that is easy to maintain, thus her focus on READABILITY. I can't tell you how many man-hours have been lost on our projects because our code is stupid and unreadable. Remember every time you've wanted to throw a brick at the guy before you? Yeah, that's stress that I really don't want yo be paying for on my project. Now:
3) Developers spend more time reading code than writing code.
4) Developers absorb code density faster via code examples than they do via documentation.
So, it's better to write self-documenting code, than to document highly analytical code. That means sensible variable/method names as well as collections/relationships that are relevant, at least where OOP is concerned.
Now, most business software is non-algorithmic, i.e. it isn't really computing so much as it is moving data around. The math isn't all that complex when the hardest thing you have to model is your database and the queries used to run it.
Considering all these things, I often hire programmers with better verbal skills, even at the expense of their analytical skills. Women tend to be more verbal than analytical, thus the authors conclusion. It's also easier to teach optimization and performance than it is to teach English grammar/syntax and how to "port" that to a programming language, and as outlined above, this is the part of the software that is not only the most expensive, but will give you the higher ROI over the life of that software. Enterprisey stuff can linger for tens of years, incurring maintenance costs all the while.
Now if the author had looked beneath the surface of what her gut (correctly) told her into the real cognition of what was going on, she might not have pissed off a bunch of insecure slashdot trolls. She might have even realized what was "better" about what she was seeing and how to train the rest of her staff to perform at that level.
but then again, commenting on a katz story is almost as self-serving as the katz story itself. -tensionboy
Whilst your intentions are good in the above, and you are correct as far as it goes, the real problem of -isms is not whether one group is generally different to another or not, but when members of a group are presupposed to conform to the stereotype. We know that a bishop moves in a specific way in chess. But the real world that you are comparing to has "bishops" that may tend to move in a particular way but very far from always do. For a generalisation such as this article makes to be a useful guide to decision making such as what gender to employ, even if the article were correct in a general case which I'm very far from allowing, the tendency would have to be absolutely overwhelming before it became more efficient to pre-judge people based on their gender rather than assess people for who they actually are.
Quite simply, the average man is seldom average, and neither is the average woman.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I've never been paid to write code, but I know how. If you're going to write code that nobody other than yourself is ever going to see or have to modify, then you can get away with not embedding comment text and generally being sloppy. You can also be as obfuscated and cryptic as you want, because again nobody else is ever going to have to try to decipher it. But seriously, if you're getting paid to code you have to assume somebody down the road is going to have to deal with how your source is written. If nothing else, your boss may want to look it over, and if your boss can't make heads or tails of it without a sherpa guide, then you're not going to be viewed favorably, are you? In a nutshell, I think writing clear, concise code, with clear, concise commenting, is the professional way to do the job.
Now let's put gender back into the equation: I wouldn't be surprised if the ratio of male to female professional programmers is 1000:1, if not 10000:1 or higher. The few women coders out there HAVE to be more professional, HAVE to do a quantum level better job than their male counterparts, if they want to be taken seriously, don't they? It's a sad commentary on humanity in general that we have to see this sexist bullshit attitude day in day out in this world, but that's what they have to contend with, so that's the only way they, as professionals, can handle it.
Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister is equally acceptable.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Where I work there seems to be a pretty good mix of male and female software engineers, and overall the finished code produced by both is pretty much the same quality.
What I have noticed though is that female engineers seem much more likely to balk when asked to do something with which they are not familiar, whereas men will attempt almost anything asked even if it ends in total disaster.
So if that observation is true, it would make women programmers -seem- to be better coders, if they're just avoiding the projects that would set them up for failure...
In a course I had taken there was discussion of coding style. This was a fairly advanced course and everyone in it was a programmer at some point in their life.
...
// always repeat until a break or return occurs ...
I showed some of the techniques that I use and most people felt they were cryptic. To me they were as clear as day.
They are useful because they make the code smaller, and therefore you have less to read to see what is happening. The girls in the class tended to be more long winded with more explanations of things that to me would be obvious. I've been criticized for not commenting enough, but I tend to write code that self comments (feeling it is more accurate, because comments lie, code doesn't).
for example,
int value = test ? result1 : result2
vs
int value;
if (test)
value = result1;
else
value = result2;
or
while(1)
{
}
vs
while(true)
{
}
You have lost 250 experience for "ignorance".
You have gone down a level. You are now level 0.
You have 0/0 HP. ZeroDivisionError. Insert quarter for more HP.
-Devin Jeanpierre
"If you knew me, you should know what I meant!". Nuff said?
I am posting anonymously to save my skin here. If women write code better than men they must write code in a different way than the way they interact with men usually. Or perhaps only other women can understand the code they write better.
Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to diss women programmers. I am sure there are some awesome women programmers. Just like some crappy male programmers. But this generalization of women writing better code seems unfair.
There is a lot more male programmers than female programmers. I can assume, only women programmers who are in the industry must be there because they are good at what they do. I find, there are male programmers in the industry that just are not good enough to hold their jobs these days.
400lbs? If that's one and a half, then one is still about 270! No prizes for guessing where you live!
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
I think the knight is better.
I find the article to be quite ridiculous. These are overly broad stereotypes, and generalisations, and I quite frankly do not see them in real life. They are more the result of myths and misandrist and sexist ideas about men. If someone were to write such an article claiming that women were less proficient, etc, it would create a huge controversy and would be called sexist against women.
Quite frankly, I am tired of these ridiculous myths that women have more emotional intelligence than men, are more caring, more concerned about others needs, etc. I think, how we behave and act is up to the individual and has nothing to do with gender, race, etc. Peoples behaviour is influenced by the culture too, and perhaps, the gender stereotypes we actually teach to children when they are young affects their behaviour, so it would be a self fulfilling prophecy. But men or women are equally capable of good or evil. I have met some of the kindest, most caring and sensitive people who are men, and some of the rudest, or most insensitive and violent people who happen to be women. It has nothing to do with gender. It can have something to do with environment and societies gender roles it creates, a persons childhood, etc. But these sorts of things, a person can change, even someone who is violent, insensitive, etc, can change their ways.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
It'd bother me mostly because of the blatent double standard. It would have been intersting to see what would have happened if someone complianed about the poster; particularly if you could swap genders and see the results. If it was a male with a similar poster up, would females be up in arms about it/be offended by it, simply because it makes a different implied statement about penises depending on the gender of the person.
Finally, you may underscore a very important point and difference between genders - men (in my experience) tend to have much thicker skins. That poster didn't bother you much, even if it was sexist. The consistent 'bitchiness' of some women is probably why many women I know hate interacting with overly concentrated groups of them - there's a critical mass of drama that happens, and without enough people to settle it down, even they get drawn into it.
And yes, one of them was quite good with great commenting style, clear understanding of the theory and algorithms we were implementing and the other one ... oh boy;
she was asking me quite often about simple things like : Hex color codes, what's the difference between something like #acacac and #ACACAC . Is lowercase a lighter color ? So, I think it's more of a generalization than rule to say that one gender is better than the other.
Bad code, no matter how well-commented it may be, is still BAD CODE. I've worked with a few female coders, and I've not been terribly impressed. One was the most hackish and inefficient I'd ever seen, lacking creativity to solve complex problems.
Men write just as bad; there are just more of them writing so the stats are skewed.
School/Education,Background & Experience are good indicators of a good engineer - male or female.
this is my sig, there are many like it, but this one is mine.
Exactly.
What this article is really about is a female who managed to get ahead in a male-dominated field, and has likely encountered sexism a number of times. Maybe she's bitter about a lack of relational interest from coworkers, or too much interest - whatever. The end result is that she's sexually biased against males: ie, she's a sexist. This is, of course, culturally acceptable in today's world for a woman.
I've only met a handful of female tech folks. I dated one for a while. I've got a generally low opinion of most of their work because I've ended up having to fix it (that's actually my current job description, and oooh boy this mess is a doozie: no documentation whatsoever, and a lot of stuff left broken/half finished/etc.). The girl I dated in tech was incredibly smart - arguably smarter than I am in most respects - but her coding and general tech abilities were "folksy" (for lack of a better term). Her code was pretty mediocre, and her understanding of things was surface level and highly subjective to opinion.
On the other hand, the female coders/tech people I've met who I can pull their own weight and not need hand-holding have been very good. They've not got caught up in the "I'm just as good as a man" head-trip self-disillusion and concentrate on their strengths - and they're not going to fuck around and let others do their owrk. This is really useful in common group project environments. In college, I'd try to get as many of these women into group projects past the 300 or so level as a result.
This usually meant more coding requirements for everyone else, but the overall project would (usually) turn out better - just hope you don't get a couple slack-jawed guys...
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
It gets worse:
Are you adequate?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
These days, coding is a team game, not the sole preserve of unsocial geeks and nerds hacking in their mother's basements. Code needs to be clear and concise but also well commented / documented. You might understand the business rules for your application inside out (not specifically coding knowledge) but new coders might / will not.
Firstly, basic structural comments (i.e. Class name, author, basic purpose, date started,a list of properties and methods etc) should be written first, before coding. That shows there is a plan in place and it is not written "on the fly" using your first test programme that you got carried away with.
Secondly, code should be self commenting. ie obvious variable names (e.g. $fileCount rather than $fc or even $i). It should not be cryptic. There is no need for it and it just shows insecurity in job and/or skill level plus an inability to adapt. That kind of code is usually the first sign that someone is not a team player.
Thirdly comments are there to help others, not to say things like: "did you notice the cool way I wrote this?". The cool way to write something is not always the best. Yes they should be concise but, if your method is carrying out, say, a complex statistical function or applying some complex 3D matrix multiplications or is following some obscure business rule or something else in a field that a novice altering your code may not be completely familiar with, then more in depth comments will be needed. Even if is just a link to a wikipedia article on the multiplication of 3D matrices, or a location of the documentation and the paragraph with the business rule in question for example.
This should be true, male or female.
America, Home of the Brave.
I'm not trying to say this is a trend or anything, but in my office of maybe 30 developers... I do tend to see the women (myself included) are a little more apt to write comments and be concerned about documentation, while a few of the guys do tend to be sort of code-cowboys with doing it the most complex 'fancy' way possible. There are plenty of exceptions all around, and bad coders on both sides... but I have kind of seen this trend.
From my own perspective... over the years I have been finding coding to be a rather lonely and less fulfilling task as I get into my late twenties. So, thinking about other programmers and those who will see my code later, is kind of a way to add a social aspect to what I'm doing. I'm also conscious of the fact that I don't want to code for the rest of my life - hope to go into management... so I'm aware that I won't always be around to interpret cryptic code.
I'd have to agree with you on reducing this to gender issues - the article informed me that I code like a girl. Now I have to delete some helpful comments to regain my masculinity.
You're not talking about FileMaker, are you?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Completely OT, but, if you're asking for street addresses, it helps to phrase the question so that the context of driving directions isn't there. Something like, "If I was sending a letter to you, what would I write on the envelope?" would be a good choice.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
I've worked with more than a dozen female programmers in my career. One of them checked in code that didn't compile, and then later explained that it wasn't her responsibility to ensure that the code actually worked. Another woman I've worked with debugs assembly for instrumentation code in monitoring tools. She works on very difficult code and does it well (fair disclosure: she's my girlfriend). Yet another woman I worked with was a fair GUI programmer, but she began slacking off as she prepared for a career completely unrelated to computers.
The truth is, I've known and worked with programmers (of both sexes) that land all along the spectrum, from dead-weight incompetent to brilliant and prolific. This is simply crude and ridiculous stereotyping.
I write directions to my house like switch statements
...
foreach (@directions)
{
switch($_)
{
case "I-5" {print "go North";}
case "Del Mar" {print "Turn left";}
else {print "Oh shit, call me";}
}
}
Very few people actually make it, which is fine as I don't have many friends anymore.
package test;
public class paulaBean {
private String paula = "Brillant";
public String getPaula() {
return paula;
}
}
I rest my case.
(http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_Brillant_Paula_Bean.aspx)
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
It's your typical "hey look I did some research and found out..." article.
1: Do some grossly unscientific "research" that no one asked for.
2: Claim some completely obvious results (men and women are different!).
3: Pander to society's bias (men are jerks and idiots! women are caring and are able to succeed in whatever they want!).
4: Get attention / more money for future "research".
Whoosh
I work with people of mediocre skill and I can't discern any difference in the quality of men's and women's code. Maybe it's different at the outer ends of the bell curve.
Nah, firebombing is totally a guy thing. Chicks would just gossip and spread nasty rumors behind the Wall Street Journal's back to all of their friends, so the New York Post and the National Review would stop inviting them to parties.
Tight scoping and carefully thought out naming of variables and functions goes a long way.....
love is just extroverted narcissism
writing clear, readable code isn't a "guy" thing or a "girl" thing, it's a "good programmer" thing. similarly, writing confusing, obfuscated code isn't a "guy" thing or a "girl" thing, it's a "clueless programmer" thing (unless it's being done for the ioccc, in which case it's totally cool).
do i comment my code? yes, but it's not because i'm "touchy-feely". i hate commenting my code. i hate documenting my work. it's a chore and a bore (and something i often leave until the very end). i do it because it's essential for me to be able to go back to my work in a few months time and understand what the heck it was i was doing/thinking at the time. this was drummed into us at school by our prof, who made code commenting and documentation 15% of the grade. he also required we use informative variable names and write legible code and we'd get dinged heavily if we didn't. i think he was right and so i continue to try to follow his advice every day, and this includes code i write purely for myself, but it goes against my nature.
i'm reminded of one time, early in my career, where i was given a small problem to solve. i solved it, then set about seeing what i could do to make it tighter and more clever, getting very caught up in the process. finally, i was very pleased to have something that used all kinds of nifty, bit-shifting tricks and whatnot and fit all on one line. i was pretty stoked, actually. awesome! it looked cool! the senior programmer mentoring me took a look at it, told me he thought it was way neat, but requested that i redo it all so that it a) was on many lines and 2) made sense to everyone else who'd have to come by later and figure out what i was doing. oh, and could i please be sure to include comments? lesson learned.
soupy twist
The buffer is 2048 bytes, and it's always good to leave slack. (I needed a buffer that was large but not too large.)
As for the & thing - it's better safe than sorry. I use parentheses EVERYWHERE.
e.g., (not real code) if (!((foo==20)||(bar>65))) { grill(); }
The obscurity is the abuse of the trinary operator (I do this a lot).
I use short, but typically explanatory variable names, though for throwaway variables I tend to use i j k etc.
In one case I have "eolv" (end of line verbose), "suppress" (suppress certain errors), "tabv" (expands tabs, for tab verbose), "verbose" (expands control chars), "unbuf" (unbuffered i/o), "c" (char iterator), "synerr" (syntax error), "pnam" (program name - it's assigned right away to argv[0]), "travel" (int interator), "start" (first argument to process). A comment lists the switches and what they do briefly, one other comment explains a vagueness in the spec. No need much for comments, "if (verbose)" speaks for itself.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Churn the hype mill much?
----
You know, if I wrote an article that said, "Men are much better coders than women for the following reasons:..." I would be lambasted as discriminatory, sexist, and part of the Vast Right Wing Glass Ceiling Conspiracy.
A chick writes the same article and flips the genders around and she's suddenly hailed as the next coming.
Ridiculous double standards. Some women write good code, some write crappy code. Ditto for men. Having excessive and generally useless comments littering the code (which is what it sounds like this lady is defining 'good code' as) is actually a drawback, not an advantage. Just because she apparently can't understand code well enough to read and interpret it like everyone else (male or female) that I've worked with in the past doesn't make her some uber-good programmer because she writes teh commentz.
The biggest problem with "brains work differently" is that "differently" is too easily interpreted as "better".
Actually the biggest problem is that it is seeking a broad stereotype based on gender, and when uttered by the Senior VP Engineering could be taken as having hiring implications. "Ah, you have a pair of knockers, code you write will surely be friendly and well-documented" is no better than "ah, you have a pair of knockers, please don't try to reverse parallel park in front of my car!"Like is the sky blue? Is Water Wet? Men are rewarded for being competitive and women are rewarded for being collaborative.
Consider the macho reward cultures of most corporations where every "team" has to be divided into faster and slower workers at the annual performance review. Collaborative teamwork is made a myth punishable by getting no raise or RIF'd.
Women are more collaborative and able to see the bigger process in almost any profession. I'm a guy and I would always rather work with women team members because it is so much less stressful not to feel them competing with me.
Of course women write cleaner code, and they also design systems that the end user will be able to actually use and perhaps (gasp)like!
Not always. Or, at least, not always clearly. Explaining that you're extracting the state of a bit is much clearer than a simple, unadorned, "if(pow(...)>256)"
Best Slashdot Co
I spent 20 years in the industry and women do produce much better code (on average). I wish there were more of them in the field. We need to make programming more attractive to girls somehow.
I've looked at a lot of code over the years and have to say that this observation would not hold up to measurement
Yes, some developers do write code for maintenance this way. More them are women? Not seen that.
Nope, that just shows that they apply differently for big dicks.
for (unsigned int i = 0; i j; i = i + 1)
{
Gosh, I hope his job does not include teaching! Clearly the loop goes from 0 to j with increments of one. Moreover, the use of i should be clear from the context, and j should never have been named j. This kind of code should not be documented for the sole reason that the next programmer may actually change the code without changing the comments.
But I presume you were not typing over his actual code
Just don't repeat my mistake of reading gay porn to your computer! The DVI cable hurts. *rubs backside*
They'll intersperse their code-those strings of instructions that result in nifty applications and programs-with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the lines the way they did and exactly how they did it. The code becomes a type of "roadmap" for others who might want to alter it or add to it later,
... now Slashdot tells me I CODE like a girl, too. :(
To sum up: A Higher percentage of girls use best-in-practice methodologies (generally written by men) because 'Girls go to college to get more knowledge, and boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider!'
Realize this is REAL PRODUCTION code - written be a female programmer(?)! Looks like something that should be in an example for programming text book!
/** x = x + 1 */
public int compare(Object o1, Object o2) {
Integer foo = (Integer)o1;
Integer bar = (Integer)o2;
return (foo.compareTo(bar));
}
There is A LOT of this kind of CRAP in our code. Also varible names such as "a,b,c,foo,bar,foobar" And comments like:
DUH!
The Truth is a Virus!!!
Hahaha, that's awesome. It's like the psychologists with the chimps choosing different colored M&Ms. Turns out sometimes you need to do math when you do statistics!
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
How come you were *all* so scared that not a single one of you had the guts to ask for it to be removed? Even when it was demonstrated hands-on that a request like that would be perfectly acceptable?
Peer pressure? Afraid of being seen as being afraid of seeing dicks?
It is pretty clear why a female boss would put up a poster like that as a blatant display of power. Every guy that walks into her room will glance over the poster, compare his dick with the one in the poster and maybe get slightly uncomfortable. Imagine having a salary negotiation with your boss with ten dicks on the wall. She knew what she was doing, and that it was "illegal." Yet by having it, and intentionally breaking the rules, she demonstrates that she has more authority that anyone else.
Football Odds
Only if you write VB for a living.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Hmm, I may know her. If you run her first and last names in lower case through "md5sum -t", is the output 87ebb5ab20b015733ff5759de095719f?
When here she was worse. Had certain large (and expensive) apps installed on D: and E: of her workstation for various GOOD reasons, but coded to assume that they were there for EVERYONE. She thought those were the proper locations.
obviously missing a genetic link (or have a redundant bad one) when they fail to realize WOMEN PROGRAMMERS are the missing link in aesthetics in software programming.
Hell, I would DARE to say there were fewer than 10% women code contributors to Open Office.org, but I could be wrong. OO.o might be a HELLUVA lot better in appearances AND functionality if MORE women are on that project... And, I'd beg them to dump it and start over by mimicking more of Lotus SmartSuite...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Every woman I've worked with knows exactly what she learned in school and nothing more. I suggested we use DB2 for a project, and the female project manager said we shouldn't use "new technology". This was in the year 2004.
In our predominantly male working environment, we had one woman who was with us for about a year. She was one of our developers and without a doubt, was the best, most technical person across all our development teams. She understood both system administration as well as programming in C, C++, Java and others.
She left to go back to work on Beowulf clusters at a local Uni.
Incidentally, I've met Emma McGrattan (the woman who started this article), and I'd rate her technical skills highly as well.
It's not about female vs male programmers. The proper question is do bad programmers write better code that good programmers? Undocumented code is "bad code". It's as simple as that. It's not one sex versus the other, though the author clearly tried to stir up those emotions to sell the article.
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_Brillant_Paula_Bean.aspx
And for those of you under the age of ten, the real truth about programming:
http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html
Tell me a woman could do that...go on, I dare you.
No sig today...
I know of a particular DB manager who manages a shambles of a DB and a web designer who wouldn't indent her html or css if her life depended on it. Women, like men, have good and bad people in certain areas of talent and men, in general, are more likely to program so they're more likely to be better at it.
But you are basing your argument on a statement that you are *pretending* to be correct.
In addition, who the hell are Ingres, anyway? They might have been relevant two decades ago, but now they hold one percent (if not less) of the market.
Again, this is a non-issue. If McGrattan worked for a relevant company like Oracle, Microsoft, or hell even MySQL it might be germane. Let her continue her sexist diatribes; in time we'll all be laughing (or busy not noticing) when they go down in flames anyway.
The volume of useless code will increase as coders worry about people attaching some extra meaning to comments, etc!
It's such a sexist label, and I never use it in reference to women because - if you ask me - it's the kind of thing insecure men say when a woman asserts herself in a way that would be perfectly excusable for a man.
Instead, I prefer to say "what a fucking asshole" or "what a fucking jerk" which are more equal-opportunity and apply equally well to men and women. I know it's weird to say, "Mary is such an asshole," but give it a try and you may find you enjoy the refreshing change.
However, when I run into a particularly impenetrable bug in my code, I am wont to say "this bug is a cunt," but I don't think it's especially demeaning, as it is both funny and British-sounding.
-- thinkyhead software and media
I dunno. My experience with female coders has generally been good, if limited. The individuals in my personal narrative arc wrote solid, if slightly pedestrian, code for solid, if slightly pedestrian, applications that still live, SFAIK, in the business world. One of them wrote absolutely brilliant code in the shrinkwrap industry; she was eventually hounded out of the cubenest for preferring to work during nearly normal business hours (say, 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.)
The guys were all infested with 'oorah Marine Corps work ethic, and tended to quit as they burned out, if at all. The rawhiding and death march last stands, coupled with an almost religious awe of all nighters that should have been unnecessary, eventually destroyed the livelihoods of 10 times more people than there were coders in the building. I loved the final Twilight of these Götterlingen: The lemmings dove over the cliff edge with a real sense of urgency.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Actually I didn't complain because I didn't give a shit. I can't say I buckled in any salary negotiation because that poster was on the wall either...lol
She was a tough woman, but I found her very easy to work for she could dish it out and also take it.
If, it had been my desktop wallpaper that got the complaint would I have asked to have her poster removed? I hope not, because that would have just been out of spite not because I was really offended.
I really only told the story because it is an example of how things are perceived differently not because I felt personally harmed.
As far as it being illegal, I don't think so. If no one complains then it's not sexual harassment, or is it?
You remind me of something I experienced in university. I was working in a group assignment in a group of 5 and 2 of them are female. They coded together, finished their components, and then left to sleep. When us 3 males reaches our system test stage, we found something that doesn't work, checked our code for long and couldn't find any problems. Then we turned to their code and found out that they've changed the API we've agreed on earlier without notifying us. Yeah, their code works together, but not with ours... Then a little later after we fixed our code to match their API, similar event happens. After a long time of debugging, we found them passing a string [code]"EMPTY"[/code] where we earlier had an verble agreement to use an "empty string". Entertaining, but not that fun when you're facing a tight deadline...
If you put helpful things for people who come after you, then your company no longer needs you. If you write unclear code, then not only do people think you're smart, but you're also irreplaceable at your job.
I code exactly like the article describes women coders, not so others will understand it later, although that is a desired end, but so in 6 months I'll understand what the hell I was thinking today.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
You all seem to forget that the very first programmers were women (ENIAC anyone?) Yes, it was designed by men, but the programmers were women. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC So before you all go off and reinforce all the stereotypes you want (personally I know guys who comment the heck out of their code and women who code the pants off their fellow male coworkers both in time, accuracy, and usability (comments and layout)), keep in mind it is PEOPLE who code, skill matters, gender does not.
A Slashdot thread without a flawed analogy is like a frozen fishstick without a train conductor. - Odin's Raven
On the contrary, it's defined as what could bother someone. Nobody necessarily must be bothered; the possibility must simply exist, as illustrated in Simonetta's comment.
Men, on the other hand, have no such pretenses. Often, "they try to show how clever they are by writing very cryptic code
It's called job security, bitch
First of all, I see a ton of (hopefully facetious) comments implying that "chicks can't code." This is bull. Back when I was studying comp sci, I had database classes taught by Moira Norrie. Not sure what she does now, but back then, she did some hardcore stuff with object-oriented dbs; she's probably a better programmer and engineer than 99.99% of the people posting on this /. story (as an aside, I also had classes by Felicitas Pauss, who now works at the LHC at CERN, which will of course soon destroy the world as we know it by producing strangelets or something - remember, dudes, your demise will be brought upon you by a woman, and don't you forget that! :-)
Having worked with a few female coders, I would tend to think that they are slightly more careful with how elegant their code is, and how readable it is. I have worked with some guys who wrote beautiful, readable code, but generally, I think the females have a slight edge here. Guys are happy if it works, females seem to be more likely to go the extra mile.
Of course, this is a subjective assessment and influenced by my own prejudices. I could be totally wrong.
Something else I've noticed is that females often get stuck doing the crap nobody wants to do, like coding Word macros after four years of studying software engineering, or coding some stupid Access database. I think most guys would quit if put in that position. Or perhaps it's that most companies would not dare insulting males by giving them such crappy assignments, while they're quite happy wasting their female engineers' time since, after all, they're just women, right?
"They try to obfuscate things in the code, and don't leave clear directions for people using it later.""
MYSOGINISTIC TRANSLATOR ENGAGED:
"Girls don't understand advanced coding, even with clear instructions."
Besides, you don't want accomplished coders writing clear code. Who knows what you will get. http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/14/0228230
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Women just have to live up to higher standards in the same jobs as men still, meaning, if you do see any women coders they are bound to be better than their male counterparts just because they will be watched and critized more carefully then male programmers
Shut up, dork. That joke has never been funny.
Code and comments are two entirely different things. What's obfuscated is the journalism that produced the actual documentation with a lack of understanding about basic coding. Had the title actually been accurate, it would have read: "Women write better comments than men." Of course, when writing code, the more terse the comments are, the better. People do not want to spend more time than they have to digesting code someone else has written, whether the author is female or male. The exact thought process needed to produce the code is completely unnecessary in most scenarios and only lengthens the file. I think the title ought to be "Women produce painfully verbose code." and that would be entirely accurate.
It is BS such as this that will ensure sexism remains in the workplace for a long time to come.
I don't care if you are a transsexual midget; if you write better code then I do, I want to work with you.
I studied Computer Science at ETH Zurich, a European institute comparable to the MIT in the US. The percentage of women starting Computer Science each year in the last decade was generally between 5% and 20%. Not sure how large the percentage of those finishing was, but back when I was studying, females were not a lot more likely to bail than males (although they often did complain about unfair treatment by profs, some of which openly proclaimed that there was no place for women in software engineering).
However you could leverage the fact that men and women think different to gain fault tolerance.
Maybe there are trends by gender, but you need to look at the actual styles. I've been paired with two other programmers with whom their strengths and weaknesses complemented mine very well. They were very similar to each other as programmers, if not socially. One is male, the other is female.
No, they did not hire a woman programmer to compile the statistics. Had you not acted like a male and actually read the fucking article, you would have noticed that there are not statistics. She didn't cite any statistics, she just made a few throwaway comments about how people behave.
Two bishops and a king == mate.
One knight and one bishop and a king == mate (albeit a difficult one).
Two knights and a king == shit.
Theres the difference.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
After I figured out what it was doing.
Best Slashdot Co
Androgyne. Although I only write obfuscated code on purpose for fun, commercially I try and write very clear and straightforward code.
But we (men) definitely know how to cook much better.
legally, (from wikipedia) the crime of sexual harassment is deemed to have occurred when the conduct is unwelcome and when a reasonable person would have considered such conduct sexual. (in the US)
HR/companies will act on what ever could "bother someone" to avoid the "sexually hostile work environment" presumably because with a "hostile work environment" a class action suit would b e possible from a single illegal incident.
so it takes unwelcome conduct (ie bothers someone) to be illegal, but almost every company will have some policy allowing them to discipline or fire you for any conduct that "could bother someone"
> Women and Men DO think different.
Ok, great. Women think differently than other women, and men think differently than other men, too.
> If you have two independent programmers do the same work, with the same requirements they will
> frequently arrive at different solutions. As most know this can be leveraged by comparing the
> output of both solutions to verify the solution is proper. If one solution was done by a male
> and the other by a female the probability of difference should go up due to the difference in
> thought patterns, I would think.
Technically, you are right. If you did this experiment enough times, you would be able to see and OVERALL (but only on the large scale, not in the individual experiments) variability that is due to sex difference. HOWEVER, between two programmers the VAST majority of the variability will be due to reasons that have nothing to do with the participants' sexes.
The bottom line is that people spend a whole lot of time on sex differences and gender differences when it comes to cognition and emotion and intelligence, and it's largely a waste of time. The diversity in these elements are great due to individual differences, mostly due to the fact that our brains are formed by our experiences more than anything else (your visual cortex organizes itself as the visual cortex because it is the group of neurons that receives visual input, for example... if you sent a different group visual input during development, THAT would be your visual cortex). The variability that can be accounted for by sex is relatively very small.
That is HILARIOUS and kudos to you for paying such close attention. You are absolutely right. If she can only do it correctly 70% of the time and she knows that 80% of the programmers are men, then she is doing WORSE THAN CHANCE.
I wish we could mod you > 5 because anyone who reads this article should see your comment, since -- as you said -- it completely invalidates the point of the article.
Or maybe "If I want to mail you a check, what should I write on the envelope?" ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Microsoft has had a slew of female programmers for years and years. During the Windows 3.x development they had many women working on the project as programmers. The person that did the "program manager" part of the OS was a woman.
At no time did anyone claim that women were better programmers nor that they are better program managers or better at any job. This isn't to say that men are better. It just isn't representative that women are better--nor men. There's no greater focus, no greater attention to detail, no greater determination to get it right.
You can just ask the guy who was tasked with writing the start button and menu for Vista. Much of the time what you program and how you program are not even within the purview of your own skill sets.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Wait, I don't get it.
Why does the fact that it's a correlation mean it's not useful? In fact, the remainder of your comment describing what WOULD be useful is also referring to correlations: women get more reasonable deadlines, men feel less secure in their positions.
Exactly. If you average two groups of different individual, you will always find differences between the groups. However, these differences only apply to the group as a whole, not to each particular individual!
Best quote of the whole thread :-)
Know any women who are developing Social Media, (Web 2.0) or Web 3.0, (The Semantic Web), applications? Please comment to this blog post to add them to a list being compiled by nFold: http://martalyall.typepad.com/nfold/2008/06/yes-women-are-geeks-and-do-develop-social-media.html
I found a female programmer a few years ago in college and married her LOL.
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing
How 'bout":
Turn left at the Starbucks.
Bear right at the Starbucks.
Turn left at the Starbucks.
Get into right lane at the Starbucks.
Make a right at the Starbucks.
Go straight towards the Starbucks.
Bob's yer uncle!
That's a rather roundabout way to say that writing comments is gay...
Same thing happened to me. I did a compiler design class with a girl (we were supposed to do "teams" of two people for the assignments). Man, she was hardcore! I was interested in the topic, but I also was kind of a lazy bum. Some of the assignments were freaking hard, and I would generally imply that I thought we should just let this one go, but man, did she do them all, and to ad insult to injury, she then had to explain to me what the hell she did! Her coding skills and understanding of hardware was off the charts.
OTOH, when learning for physics tests, it would generally be me explaining stuff to her.
The first year of studying, I barely managed to get passing grades; but after we started doing everything together, both our grades improved tremendously and I think we both eventually finished in the top percent of your year.
I'm not sure if we complemented each other so well due to our different genders (I would normally expect males to do quite well at compiler design), but whatever the reason was, it sure worked for us.
Unfortunately, after finishing studying, her first job was at a company where she wrote fucking Word and Excel macros. I guess her employer simply thought that girls were too dumb to write "real" code. She eventually changed jobs and is much happier now.
Works fine til the bargain outlet closes down. Meanwhile, the road remains 5 miles long.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Pardon me, but what the hell does gender have with code? Present me a pure biological/medical reason why would women write better code and men worse? All this is is drawing nice little sociological circles and claiming that all women fit in this circle and men in the other - it's lame, old and generally dismissed.
And taking examples doesn't count - I have about 18 females in my college group: 1 writes completely garbled code (her code ended up being an example how NOT to write code; she defined obfuscation), 1 grasped the concepts but writes lines of over 300 characters (wrapping and line breaks seem to irritate her), 2 write crappy but well formatted code, and the rest write the standard two-tabs-max readable code with little comments. On the other side, there's about 16 men in the group (myself not included): 1 writes completely bloated code with tons of useless variables but formats it quite nicely, 2 write obfuscated code and the rest write regular (as advised, nice formatting, readable).
Not to exclude me, I write code as my tutor says or as the language author (or a very influential programmer in that language) advises.
Btw, you know 90% of statistics are wrong?
Finding and fixing subtle flaws in complicated software is a lot of fun. (openbsd.com)
In almost 20 years of engineering, I have not met one Female engineer that does design work. (Only sales)
46137
Likewise, I suspect it has to do with whether one is taught geography and mapmaking while still in grammar school. Which is probably why (all jokes aside) how well people read maps, follow directions, and avoid getting lost tends to be a regional thing that follows local education trends. Those who aren't *taught* these skills generally can't make sense of a map unless they've already been to the spot and can put the map into the context of known landmarks.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
You must live in Seattle!!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I think the article does succeed in saying that because there are more male programmers, they are more at fault for bad code existing. From the article's view, say there are 20% female and 80% male programmers. Say that 60% of code is poorly written and documented. This would then imply that women are responsible for only 20% of the bad code which would correspond to 12% of overall code, and the men are responsible for 80% of the bad code which corresponds to 48% of overall code. This should make it OBVIOUS that a male's code has 4 times that of a female's code to be bad.
Microsoft uses The Wizard of Oz to train the PC's speech-to-text system buried in later versions of Word. My co-workers thought that I was crazy when I read a few chapters of it into the PC to get the Sp2Tx working. I was too busy to follow up on it.
That's kindof how I write fiction. Explain what's going on to someone else, then backfill until it's all seen from the characters' POV -- essentially comment, then code.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
It truly has nothing to do with sex. It's about communication. Some people are good at communicating, others are just good at talking. They are not the same.
:)
Well communicated
I do think the article is sexist--being able to judge 70-80% of the time which sex is doing the coding is not really showing much of a trend. Some coders are more meticulous. You cannot judge that the women (or men) who put in the comments did so to help future coders or just as a note to themselves. Or some code may seem obfuscated, but it's just the way the programmer's brain is wired. The article does itself a diservice, it distracts from it's two main points: Getting more women into programming and making sure programmers are better at communication within their code so as not to hamper the company. But it's not helpful to say you want more women programmers (simply) because they comment nicely in the programming.
Personally, as the article touched on, I think the most successful way to increase the number of women programmers, engineers, mathematicians, etc. will be as girls see more women in those positions.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
Who cares if women tend to be more verbal than analytical? We are not talking about women in general and men in general. We are talking about women programmers and male programmers. Do you have data on tendencies there, because I don't.
Assuming that the same trend from the general population would exist in this very specific smaller population with its own variables would be a HORRIBLE logic error, ESPECIALLY in a area where analytical skills are highly valued.
It's good to see that men do not have an exclusive lock on sexist stereotypes.
Prime example of American sexism in one of the few forms it exists today.
the few forms...
I've worked with my own code and the code of others, both male and female. For many decades. Newbies code like newbies. Masters code like masters. I haven't seen a gender difference. There are some people who provide better comments, a roadmap, others who don't. If there's a gender difference it's awfully subtle.
I18N == Intergalacticization
Well, gentlemen, if it's wisdom you seek it is what I will bring you you answer is such: Developing good code has nothing to do with your: gender age class hair smell (though that may directly effect how large your team is) voice shoes it is directly dependant on how much you : A) Love it C) Practice it D) Learn it Please send checks made out to cash to "You Are Awesome" c/o GirlDeveloper.com
And I've been on teams with guys who couldn't copy the example off the web properly-no really, I spent a decent amount of time basically plugging the example code into his so everything would work. For every girl I know who's hopeless, I know 5 guys who don't really understand the concept of an object. I also know a 'lite female programmer, and a handful of male ones. Whad'ya know, the actual ratio of good to bad is probably damn near the same for both genders.
open source modern art: laser taggi
This article is one big troll, but hey I will bite :).
We have 5 developers where I work, 4 males and 1 female. The only one I wouldn't trust to touch my code is the female. Why? Because she is quite happy to write a method that is 100s (yes 100s) of lines long, and (as if that isn't bad enough) it will have a scattering of a handful of irrelevant comments through it. Is she new? No, she has been a developer for 10 years.
But hey, maybe it's because she is Asian? (Joking)
I was asked to remove my wallpaper of the 'motherly' woman wearing the BSOD shirt... the reason... it 'focused' on her ample bosom. So I found the zoomed-out version with her face in it. They didn't like that either. Found one with a flat-chested woman. They didn't like that either. Why? Some ugly, fat, whining, bitch!!!
Enlightenment is the elimination of that which is unnecessary.
Men are often better at math, structure and logic on avarage, but you have always got exceptions. But when you take woman who are just as good at math, structure and logic us man fall behind. That is because (sorry I am not a native English speaker so I don't know the English terms for the following:) the 'bridge' that connects the 'left part of the brain' with the 'right part' of girls is bigger. That means girls are better at dealing with more than one thing at the same time, so they ,in this case, probably see more potential for bugs and are more creative, with in this case code, than man. Girls have a bigger imagination than man ("I don't need pr0n"). Girls also are better at language on avarage than guys so they probably also write lesser ugly code than man on avarage.
Here be signatures
I've generally found that better programmers write better code. The correlation is actually pretty statistically significant.
Why is all this new-age sexist/anti-sexist crap hitting the net-o-sphere lately? We don't "need" more women in computing/development/architecture/whathaveyou any more (or less) than we "need" more people with blonde hair. We NEED people who can do the damn work. Who show up on time. Who can admit they're wrong. Who can come up with good answers to hard questions. If those people happen to be women, huzzah. If not, equally fine.
Before you design for reuse, make sure to design it for use.
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_Brillant_Paula_Bean.aspx
All genders? There's more than two?
I can't believe how many morons on youtube thought that was a real commercial. I know (with that /. ID) you didn't. Here is the movie http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099316/.
I finally updated my sig, but now it's lame.
... or he went out to dinner and a movie with her - and her boyfriend.
Here's how:
#1. Start a punk band
#2. Wear ThinkGeek T-Shirts during gigs
#3. Hit on the girls who laugh at the joke on your T-Shirt.
#4. Collect Underpants (behind the couch, wedged behind the bed, etc).
Of course, perhaps part of why this works for me is that... I apparently code like a girl. No one ever gives me time to do proper documentation, and when you're in a punk band you tend to drink a lot - so if I didn't leave blog-sized comments in my code; I wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of it then next time I came in hungover. Plus, I've had to clean up after show-offs who don't comment or document their code, and use single letter variable names for everything. And then leave when their code doesn't work.
Ever try to debug a function that neither works, nor gives any indication of what it would it would do if it *did* work? Oh boy, that's fun, eh?
Being considerate in general makes you a better coder, *and* a better catch. Give it shot.
In my experience, there is very little difference between male and female programmers. The comment that men write hard to read cryptic code is more apptly applied to programmers with less experience. When I was inexperienced, I used to write cryptic code, but I quickly learned that it's better not to outsmart yourself. Most of the programmers that I know now do not write cryptic code, because its just self defeating. Returning to a cryptic project in as little as 2 months can leave you wondering how the heck you figured it out in the first place.
As a practical matter, if your computer can evaluate positions 30+ ply in the future, whether or not it really "understands" the overall strategic situation is a moot point. Beyond that, the point about endgames is inaccurate for a number of reasons. For one, there's the fifty move rule, which will draw the game even if the chess engine is stupid. For another, endgame tables enable computers to play all endgame scenarios with six or fewer men perfectly. Thirdly, even without endgame tables, the problem of mate becomes vastly simplified by decreasing the number of pieces. Having more and subtler heuristics is good until a point (I believe I read a good explanation of this in the book Behind Deep Blue by Feng-Hsiung Hsu), but searching deeper tends to end up giving better answers, as a rule of thumb.
:)
All else being equal, a bishop is slightly better than a knight because you can set up a position with the knight on the side of the board where all of the knight's potential moves can be covered by the bishop. In terms of chess engines, one way of evaluating pieces (which can be extended to positions in general) is the number of moves they have: more is generally better. I don't remember offhand what the preferred method of board evaluation is these days, though; that method may have been superseded.
Now, as to your actual point, I think that nothing is black and white. Not even chess.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Clearly, the really important question to stockholders is whether gays write more flamboyant code.
Seastead this.
Its the person not the sex of the person. Either the person understand to do these things or not. While, females tend to be more aware of others feels, in the work world they approach the job the same way as males do.
Just wondering.
I'm not saying she did this, but I imagine any scientific study of such would have a set of code chunks such that 50% were written by men, and 50% by women, not by ratio of percentage of men programmers to women programmers. Of course, any comment that says "Written by Mary" would also have to be removed.
"Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose." --Douglas Adams
You throw, i mean code like a girl.
>>I don't know, I've never even seen a woman programmer.
So you're saying Brooks should do a sequel: The Mythical Woman Month?
The problem of comparing a minority with the majority is that often best of the minority is compared with the average. I am sure the best of the majority will have no match from the minority
Wow, an article written by a woman, about women, quoting women who expound about womens superiority to men. Stunning!
I have had plenty of opportunities to work with women developers in the past 15 years. I have yet to see one that is a "better" programmer than all the other men I've worked with. Better than some, maybe, but not the best. Oh, and they NEVER commented/documented any more than the guys did. And the guys' code was NEVER obfuscated or confusing to anyone who knew what the heck they were doing.
I must say, however, there is one area that women in IT are invaluable...when working with women in other departments within the company. This is an especially important skill for managers to leverage when working with departments where a large percentage of women are typically found (like HR, Accounting, Sales and Administrative/Executive Assistants). In many cases the perception of the women outside IT toward the women in IT was that they were competent, skilled, and "tough" for working in a traditionally male-dominated industry. In several cases, the perception of technical skills could not be further from the truth, but hinting at an IT woman's lack of ability to other women would only come to no good.
The trick I learned was to gain the respect of the women in IT by adopting traditionally "female" traits (communication skills, empathy, etc.) and leverage it as a means to gain the repect of women outside IT. This has allowed inroads to be made throughout my career where other men had traditionally failed in the past. Manipulative, yes, but, then again, manipulation is a trait normally associated with women.
one thing I have noticed is that though the code is well commented quite often women as programmers tend to create really strange hierarchies- it is difficult to debug because rather than a top down structure they tend to work laterally and have odd variable names that don't relate to the function- sometimes it's better- though quite often it is like asking your girlfriend where the remote went and she says some random thing like "it is in the cabinet under the TV, since that is where it seemed like it belonged" when it is obviously not where you use it or convenient to retrieve it there.
Balls women write better codes. Its enough if they write code at all. There's no red or yellow or even blue rated woman coder in topcoder. Which one is better: writing a "hello world" program full of naming conventions and comments or a "useful web spider"?
Dear Slashdot,
I program like a girl, am I gay?
It does. Not all programming languages have such luxuries.
I've had people tell me my code was unreadable because I use the C language ?: construct too much.
I'm also prone to write:
bool okF = true;
okF |= first_step();
okF |= second_step();
return okF;
I prefer boolean algebra over clunky if/then, switch/case statements. It's closer to reasoning process that establishes code correctness.
Similarly, I *never* use break/continue to mess up my loop iterators. Again, correctness is a boolean function, not a plate of spaghetti.
My idea of unreadable code is any code with nested break/continue/return statements. Makes the logic perilous to follow or restructure.
But if the coder wants to use a rich operator set to concisely express a mathematical relationship, that deters me not at all.
OTOH, any possible intrusion of integer overflow into a calculation needs at least five lines of comments to explain A) why it can't happen, or B) why it won't matter if it does happen, or C) how to fix it when it breaks.
The main thing I want to see in comments is the programmers line of thought in convincing themself that their code is correct and robust, or some facsimile thereof.
By robust I mean will continue to be correct when edits are made in the near proximity.
Is it more of a male or a female trait to cast judgment that a block of code is unreadable without disclosing the personal criteria on readability?
Actually, if I was writing code instead of words, that would have been the only thing I was worried about.
ok &= statement;
error |= statement;
Glass half full, glass half empty.
Somehow your directions sound about right for a "bloke down the pub".
I've known two. Both very bright, both different coders.
The first one used to teach programming - a variety of languages/tools - and so she was necessarily never *really* very good at any of them - however, she thought she was great at literally everything in life.
The second one used to be a professional [as in she had a job at it] C++ programmer. However, she never took the time to truly understand how things worked ["I just keep adding *s or &s until the warnings go away"], and, worse IMHO, she never got to grips with what libraries, profilers and other useful 'bit and bobs' were all about. Lastly, she also never got into the language, i.e., her code wouldn't port or compile on any other platform than she worked on, and she'd no interest in learning better methods than those that she already knew. I think she basically had no true interest in learning how to code well/better -- it was just a job.
Most of the guys I've programmed with were better than either of these. Ok, so some didn't like being shown 'a better way' [ego probably], but most were fine with learning new things.
I'm also not sure I'd like to see *too much* by way of 'why' something was done in the comments [too much clutter] - short sharp relevant comments are good, but in the end, it's the code that's right and up-to-date.
@peetm
The knight can hit every square on the board; the bishop only half of them. That's a clear advantage to me. Perhaps you made a bad analogy -- stick to cars next time (I suggest: stick shift versus automatic gearbox...)
No, only men firebomb because they are responsible for all that's wrong with the universe; including repression of women who are responsible for all that is good.
Seriously though, this sounds like the same load of crap I've been hearing since Kindergarten. Trying to compare the sexes and determine who is better at what is the worst game we ever decided to play.
So a woman is professing how much better women are at coding (or whatever). Yawn. No bias and feminist sentiment there... ;+)
Talk like this usually makes for good flame wars but rarely has any substance. That said I would like to see more women coders: women make better coffee.
Your male colleague is still an idiot. ;)
Unless, of course, Zarhan actually wrote that line of code himself to show us a typical example of his male colleague's code, in which case Zarhan is the idiot.
Smile when you say that, pardner. :)
Zoe Brain - Rocket Scientist
Actually, my experience is the opposite: men tend to give bad directions because they are optimizing by time, i.e. they will give you their idiosyncratic shortcuts. "turn on the blue house with the big dog, go straight until you the Dairy Queen..." While women tend to give clearer directions which may take longer, but are easier to follow. Considering that the context is someone who doesn't know the area, easy but long directions beat short but complex... hey! that matches the description of how women code at the start of this thread :)
Yes. The social selection, at least in Europe is stronger for women which means that they have a stronger selection. Only the really interested ones will take a Job in programming. This means they will, in average, be better programmers. (you read correctly - not other, just better)
Did anyone complain. Until someone complains, there is no sexism here.
to sum things up:
men:
10 CLS
20 PRINT "hello world"
30 END
women:
10 CLS : REM clears the screen
20 RANDOMIZE TIMER
30 mood% = INT(RND * 32768)
40 IF mood% = 1 THEN
50 PRINT "hello world" : REM prints hello world on the screen
60 ELSE GOTO bitch
70 END : REM ends the program
-I only code in BASIC.-
Try introducing her to your python!
From what I have heard of Sony (Europe's) recruitment practises, that advert is quite believable.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
last time i checked i was one girlie girl, and i write code... maybe all that red bull is making me write more thoughtful, sensitive code lol.
*LOL*
;-)
It is released as Public Domain, for many reasons.
First of all because I like to share my work. Second because someone totally missed the point, and decided to waste moderator points by modding it down (which I take as proof that someone is deliberately trying to keep the code out of the free market)...
- Jesper
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
...at Ingres because only about 20% of the engineers are women, McGrattan says. (Most of them are in jobs involving quality assurance or adapting the product to a new locale, she says, and not the "heavy lifting" of writing code.)So, basically, she'd get a higher score if she guessed "man" every time than if she tries to be clever. Clearly, then, she does think some men's code looks like it's been written by a woman, which invalidates to point of the article.
I have mod points but you're already at 5 so I'm just going to reiterate your comment as it's the most insightful thing in this discussion yet. reading between the lines on that second quote, it appears she wouldn't get just a slightly higher score by always guessing it was a man who wrote the code, but a much higher score since only 20% of the engineers are women and most are not writing code. I think all this article really tells us is that Ingres churns out shitty code and (like most software dev companies) has a larger percentage of men working there than womenTIAEAE!
-Devin Jeanpierre
What a delusional feminist bitch. She is so wrong. Fifteen years in to my programming career, I've seen all styles of coding from both genders. My own style is close to what she describes as the female style. I've fucking had it up to here with men being trashed by successful women who happen to be feminists. She can come talk to me about gender differences in coding skill AFTER she's lived 31 years as a white male. Jeeeee-zus! Someone get me the duct tape for her mouth.
Could someone please remind me how making programs easier to reverse engineer corresponds to being a better programmer? Tricksy is good in programs; it means that they can't fire you because you're the only one that understands the code.
In the beginning there was Adm. Grace Hopper and she begat basic. and then the programmers begat ibm/ms dos and dr dos. ibm/ms dos paired with norton/windows and dr dos and paired with pctools. things were clear and concise with the tools and dr dos and many obfuscations could be cleared up using these resources.
Or at least they are very smart: Grace Hopper mother of COBOL...
www.littletutorials.com
Therefore men write bad codez!!!! hahahaahahaha!
I want to have sex with your male colleague!11!oneone!1!11!eleven!1!
More like someone who got lost trying to get there .. or on the way home ;-)