if your coworker says 'ana over in sales is a babe' they're almost certainly commenting on her appearance, not just mentioning her gender. even if they don't explicitly mention her b16 b00b5, you may reasonably wonder if they're judging you on the same basis, and in particular whether you'd have a better yearly peer evaluation if you were a dowdy man instead of a dowdy woman
if they instead say 'leslie over in sales is a dood' they're just being explicit about his gender, perhaps because someone thought he was female
i'm not endorsing any value judgments for or against these statements, just explaining what other people's thinking (factually) is which leads to the kind of value judgments that lead to policies against putting b00b135 in your source code
i suspect cafed00d was included as a (possibly counterproductive) gesture to allay equity concerns like yours rather than because of any serious concern that a cafed00d constant would cause anyone any concern on its own
It's probably based on the Hexspeak Wikipedia page [1], which contains 7 "babe" constants and only 2 "d00d" constants. So we already had much more "babe" magic constants to start with, I wonder why... ;-)
A lot of my posts are mildly cryptic and meant to be humorous, but I’ll just put this out here seriously. I think anyone who originates an identifier like DEADBABE is a sick pup.
