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.
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.
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.
What makes you think my comment would have been different if she had not been a woman, but a man? I have experienced enforced comments, and that was in all men environments. I have complained about it against men, too.
I feel confident enough from my experience to say that her commenting rules are bullshit. I gave the reasons, too: comments are bad because they go stale. Enforced comments lead to ridiculous comments and tedious typing work that is resented by developers. If she really has found a way around that, it would be sensational, I would love to read an article about it. If she has several mandatory comment fields in the code, it is essentially just a TPS report translated to coding. Before you can write any code, you have to fill in a form - that can't be fun, not matter if the boss is male or female.
Maybe she is still a super-coder, it is not as if she is the only one coming up with awful rules in face of the unsolved problem of managing IT projects. Most managers probably resort to such means eventually (that's why the TPS report joke exists), and then forget to switch back when it doesn't work out. That is why big companies become horrible work places in the long run. Now she works for a big company, so maybe she does a good job for that environment - I don't mean that as demeaning, I guess somebody had to do the corporate stuff (I actually envy corporate folks for their endurance and staying power). I merely pointed out that I loathe that kind of thing. If you like it, more power to you.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but this really has nothing to do with sexism. On the other hand, you display exactly the kind of "political correctness" that makes people resent issues like sexism, because it is just used as a manipulative tool (you can always brush off criticism by crying "sexism").
"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.
"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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
It really depends on what kind of code you are writing. If you are writing a component or framework with a public API to be consumed by others, it is very important to document methods throughly. I agree that the code itself should be as clear and understandable as possible, and a superfluous comment is worse than no comment - DRY.
However the more complex and clever the code get, the more you need comments. Note that Knuth, one of the smartest and manliest programmers, invented literate programming.
We have no idea whether the woman in question demand stupid superfluous rote comments, or rather want well-documented API's or literate code ala Knuth.
BTW. I think the Inquirers slant on the article is clearly sexist, but also that she brought it upon herself by framing the issue in terms of men vs woman.
My reasoning is: because of male dominance and stereotypes in IT, women will think twice about entering the field. Therefore the ones who choose it, will be more passionate and determined than the average male colleague.
It is just my theory, I have never seen any statistical evidence one way or the other.
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.