Men write code from Mars, women write more helpful code from Venus

[ojbyrne]

http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/06/06/men-write-code-from-mars-women-write-more-helpful-code-from-venus/

[aggieben]

Love the comments at the bottom. Especially:

  We don’t "all know that men hate to ask for directions,"
  Rebecca. This is a stereotype created to protect women 
  from the embarrassment that they are poor map readers. A 
  man reads a map, if he can, and asks directions if he 
  must. A woman asks directons only, because a map is not 
  helpful to her.

[schleyfox]

Sounds like someone has a chip on their shoulder.

> "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."

...

> "because only about 20% of the engineers are women, McGrattan says"

Holy crap, she can tell whether code is written by a man or a woman at a slightly worse rate than random chance.

I have a picture in my head of how these standards work out:

int a = 0; //create an integer variable and initialize it to zero.

[ssanders82 → schleyfox]

That's the first thing that popped into my head when I read that sentence. Hey, me too! Male, male, male, male, male. 4/5 correct. I'm a genius.

70% to 80% of the time I can also guess whether a date in history was a weekday, whether the stock market will rise or fall for a calendar year, and whether your last bathroom visit was a #1 or #2.

Ok, back to writing my cryptic non-commented strings of computer instructions.

Also, your code should read like this for extra safeness:

int a; // create an integer variable

a = 0; // initialize it to zero

[timr → schleyfox]

Assuming that she was being cynical, and consistently guessing "male", then you'd be right. However, if she were truly guessing randomly, you'd only expect her to be right (.5(.8) + .5(.2)) * 100 = 50% of the time.

All you can conclude is that whatever strategy she's using, it's about as good as the best non-random strategy you could devise given prior knowledge of the situation.

[iloveyouocean]

First I read about the code men write to send TO Mars (Phoenix rover) and now I find out that its actually FROM Mars.

It seems as though one of these stories is factual and the other . . .

[ojbyrne]

I posted this here so it would get the ridicule it deserves.