
'Women write more expressive, sensitive code' - kirubakaran
http://www.theinquirer.net/articles/printView/gb/inquirer/news/2008/06/09/women-write-expressive
======
helveticaman
This article is disgusting.

There's one source, and she's...playa hating, to say the least.

Advocating underrepresented minorities is like riding a tank. It's fun, nobody
will disagree with you, and if a "tank man" (cf. Tiananmen square) shows up,
you can effectively lynch him (cf. Lawrence Summers, James Watson).

Now, blatant reverse sexism aside, is the writer correct? There's one source,
who may be an itsy-bit biased, but yeah, I believe it. It could be true that
women document more. I don't think that they're categorically superior coders,
though, as this article seems to imply, and I'm not exactly eager to work at
that database company.

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bayareaguy
"forcing men to write more detailed accounts of their coding issues, and
expressing their programming problems before each new block of code is
written. Lovingly written."

Hmm.. I know I wouldn't last there long. My first reaction would be to explain
my problems like this:

 _It was a dark and stormy node; the files served from torrents -- except for
occasional intervals when checked by a violent gust of spam which swept up the
subnet (for it is in the colo that our scene lies), rattling along the
interfaces, and fiercely invalidating the scanty lines of the caches that
struggled against the load._

------
Tichy
I assume this is a parody, and as such, it is very well done.

If not, I can only assume that women has never met Steve Yegge.

~~~
olavk
It is not a parody. If you follow the link to the original article, you can
see that she is just claiming that women are better at documenting code, which
is a reasonable hypothesis. The Inquirer on their own account added the slant
about womens code being more "sensitive" and so on, probably to make here look
like an idiot. (Also fun to see how "user-friendly and gender-neutral" coding
standards in WSJ becomes "womanish" coding standards in the Inquirer :-)

Sine there are far fewer women programmers, I would expect the average female
programmer to be better than the average male - including being better at
documenting code.

However the article sounds like she is only basing it on anecdotal evidence.
It would be quite interesting to see a more scientific study.

~~~
Tichy
In any case, I absolutely loathe the kind of coding standards she is trying to
enforce. It sounds like micromanagement bullshit, forcing developers to do
stuff they resent. The extreme endresult are those comments on getters and
setters in Java:

/ __* gets the variable */

int getVariable() {...}

I could scream and climb up walls when I see that or worse, have to write
that. If you don't write the comment, though, some fascist "quality control"
algorithm will show a read flag and make the managers unhappy.

I thought the consent by now was that understandable code is to be preferred
over comments, especially since comments have a tendency to become stale.

~~~
timr
I think the comments here do a better job of reflecting the problems women are
up against as coders, than they do of reflecting the constraints this
particular woman has imposed upon her team.

Despite the fact that absolutely _no_ details were provided in the article
about her standards, or what she's trying to achieve (other than a few "pithy"
interpretations by the author), you've jumped to the conclusion that it's
_"micromanagement bullshit"_. You've also taken the most absurd interpretation
of her remarks. Why? I'm quite confident that any experienced developer knows
the difference between your example, and good documentation practices. Since
this particular woman has managed to rise to a position of high authority,
perhaps we should give her the benefit of the doubt, hmm?

Anyway...if they weren't so sad, the anguished geek cries of "sexism" in this
thread would be hilarious. It's hard to be oppressed by discrimination when
you're in the clear and obvious majority.

~~~
Tichy
"You've also taken the most absurd interpretation of her remarks"

Where do you read that? I have not referred to her remarks in any way, I only
referred to the practice of enforced comments in general. I don't even know if
she's a Java Developer.

I see this kind of commenting every day, from experienced developers, too.
There are now tools that run automatically (like during the nightly build) and
rise red flags if a Java method doesn't have comments, so people write those
stupid comments to shut up the tool. I have also seen the "get the value"
comments in enterprise level open source projects. It is the way developers
kill time these days.

~~~
timr
_"I absolutely loathe the kind of coding standards she is trying to enforce.
It sounds like micromanagement bullshit, forcing developers to do stuff they
resent."_

Unless you work for her, or know her personally, you have no idea what kind of
coding standards she's trying to enforce. You've referenced her management and
called it bullshit, because you've _assumed_ that she's doing absurd things
that you've experienced on bad projects in the past.

~~~
Tichy
Quote from the WSJ article (italics by me): "In an effort to make Ingres’s
computer code more user-friendly and gender-neutral, McGrattan helped
institute new coding standards at the company. They require programmers to
include a _detailed set of comments before each block of code_ explaining what
the piece of code does and why; developers also must supply a detailed history
of any changes they have made to the code"

That is more than enough to make a judgment in that case.

~~~
timr
No, you're jumping to conclusions.

Requiring a "detailed set of comments before each block of code" doesn't imply
that the comments have to be there if they're inane.

~~~
Tichy
I have stated my personal preferences. It is fine if you disagree (I honestly
don't care), but it is not OK to call me sexist for it.

~~~
timr
Who called you sexist? I haven't even _used_ the word in this thread.

I've said that you're jumping to conclusions, and implied that your reaction
to this one woman is hostile, but I've never accused you of being sexist.
Perhaps you need to take a step back and re-read what I've written.

~~~
Tichy
You have written

"I think the comments here do a better job of reflecting the problems women
are up against as coders [...] if they weren't so sad, the anguished geek
cries of "sexism" in this thread would be hilarious. It's hard to be oppressed
by discrimination when you're in the clear and obvious majority."

If I somehow misinterpreted that, my apologies - english is just my second
language.

~~~
timr
Ah...I see. I wasn't talking about you (or calling anyone sexist), but the
wording was kind of subtle. I was referring to the many other comments that
were/are complaining about the "sexism" of the story.

------
menloparkbum
I've worked in this biz a long time, and have worked with several women, and
I've yet to see useful documentation...

------
dusklight
Something I have learnt the hard way: Comments are bad for you.

I used to be a big proponent of comments too, until I realized that having the
right variable and function names makes for much better documentation. Any
time a chunk of code gets complicated enough for you to feel you need to
comment it, you should just abstract it into another function. If you look at
arc.arc it is very much written in this fashion.

The problem with comments is that they are not tightly coupled to the
implementing code .. if someone comments something and then someone else comes
along and changes the code without changing the comment, and then someone else
comes along and tries to figure out the code by reading the comment ...

------
ppdes
I've found this to be true in a bad way. One female co-worker writes comments
like this:

//Get the HttpSession from request.

HttpSession session = request.getSession();

To anyone who knows Java, that comment is just a waste of space that gets in
the way.

------
tyn
"The superwoman of code ..... forcing men to write more detailed accounts of
their coding issues, and expressing their programming problems before each new
block of code is written"

You know much better your programming problems after starting writting code.
Prototyping facilitates thinking and designing. The "superwoman" is clueless.

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xenoterracide
interesting... care to show us this 'wonderful superwoman code' so we can
emulate its style?

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giles_bowkett
What a load of sexist bullshit. I've worked with several women coders. Some
were better than others. It's only possible to make this kind of ridiculous
blanket statement because so few women coders exist in the first place. Small
sample size, nada mas.

(Yes, I accused a woman of being sexist. If that doesn't make sense to you
please Google sexism instead of bothering me.)

~~~
timr
Two words: crocodile tears.

I'd think I'd trade 80% of the sexist men in this industry for a few more
sexist women.

------
peanutcruncher
I've been in this business a long time and have yet to meet any women who
write code.

~~~
dhs
Ever heard of Grace Murray Hopper?

~~~
ovi256
Please prefix her name with Rear Admiral, per proper usage.

------
ComputerGuru
And men write more code, period.

~~~
ComputerGuru
I guess I should have made the tongue-in-cheek humor a bit more obvious (my
reply was referring to the sensationalist headlines) - I actually have two
brilliant women working for me and their coding is awesome :)

