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Do Women Write Better Code?
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Jun 16, 2008 07:30 AM
from the better-than-me-at-least dept.
from the better-than-me-at-least dept.
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. "
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Remember: Sexism's Only Alright If It Favors Women (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Remember: Sexism's Only Alright If It Favors Wo (Score:5, Funny)
/cry
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Re:Remember: Sexism's Only Alright If It Favors Wo (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Remember: Sexism's Only Alright If It Favors Wo (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Remember: Sexism's Only Alright If It Favors Wo (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, this article is almost completely fallacious... Let's look at the facts quoted:
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.
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Re:Remember: Sexism's Only Alright If It Favors Wo (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Remember: Sexism's Only Alright If It Favors Wo (Score:5, Funny)
Who said women couldn't code?
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Re:Remember: Sexism's Only Alright If It Favors Wo (Score:5, Funny)
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Deadlines... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Remember: Sexism's Only Alright If It Favors Wo (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Remember: Sexism's Only Alright If It Favors Wo (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Remember: Sexism's Only Alright If It Favors Wo (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Remember: Sexism's Only Alright If It Favors Wo (Score:5, Funny)
-uso.
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well, hire a bunch of women (Score:5, Funny)
yeah yeah... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:yeah yeah... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:yeah yeah... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also I have nearly 20 years of professional software development. You wound me sir.
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Women aren't good programmers (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Women aren't good programmers (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Women aren't good programmers (Score:5, Funny)
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Wow, What A Revelation. (Score:5, Funny)
"Men and women think differently."
This is such shocking news. Unbelievable.
Simplistic? True? (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Since the whole article is based on anecdotes... (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
I write code like that guy (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Since the whole article is based on anecdotes.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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Not my experience (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Bad programmers methinks (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Bad programmers methinks (Score:5, Insightful)
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Of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Of course (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Cos we all know that testosterone is bad, and women engineers are all better because, well, they're not mad things driven by their hormones, like silly men.
Basically the woman is a fool with an agenda (women into computing) so is constructing a theory to fit the purpose using crass gender stereotypes. There are good coders who document and comment clearly. There are good coders who don't, but should. There are rotten coders who both do and don't document and comment clearly. But any attempt to assign any of the former attributes to gender specifics is pathetic, and more than a little worrying for someone who, I presume, is responsible for employing people under present gender discrimination laws. If I worked for her I would more than a little annoyed at being patronised and my coding style & skills being categorized by gender.
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Poor observation skills (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Oh come on, Slashdot! (Score:5, Funny)
Why do you need to explain what code is? This is news for nerds, not news for my mother. Give us some credit please.
Beware of Female Programmers (Score:5, Funny)
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 [free-toys.co.uk]
Gender differences (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
McGrattan's Blog (Score:5, Informative)
Re:McGrattan's Blog (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks for the link. When she refers to gender as "women" and "boys" it really makes it clear where her prejudices are.
As a young man, I have worked hard to mentally apply the words "women" and "ladies" in place of "girls" during recent years because I have found that many females have a reasonable personal preference not to be called "girl" ("chick" is also a bad choice).
In any case, seeing "boys" applied within an "anti-man" argument is a refreshing reminder that women also suffer the negative effects of sexism and bigotry.
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Re:McGrattan's Blog (Score:5, Insightful)
How does "nothing I'd ever thought about before" and "fairly androgynous" code add up to "at least 80 per cent of the time [ft.com]"?
If you publish shit based on psychic code-reading ability and made-up, pulled-out-of-your-unthinking-ass subjective factoids, you need to publish it as what it is - fiction.
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Documentation (Score:5, Funny)
Or women don't document at all and just expect the men to know what they are thinking.
Actual comments from woman-code: (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Actual comments from woman-code: (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, I couldn't stand to see an unclosed comment... It was driving me nuts.
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I don't think so. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Stereotypes are an ugly thing.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
i don't know if women write better code (Score:5, Insightful)
congrats slashdot for picking a topic everyone feels entitled to comment on and absolutely no one actually says anything useful on
Re:Do women write better code? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Do women write better code? (Score:5, Funny)
That kinda scared me a little.....
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Re:Do women write better code? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Do women write better code? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Do women write better code? (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, wait, I have met a few others. They were no longer coding, they somehow had left the field and had a change of careers (working minimum wage jobs through a contract agency...) Actually, no different than after the big dotcom bubble pop and I met several (male) "network admins" who were (and still are, 7? years later) driving delivery truck. Seems they can't find a job in their field of choice again. I think the companies were looking for any excuse to let them go as these guys were from some very large manufacturing companies that really weren't effected by the dotpop.
Seriously, how many women, percentage wise compared to men, are in the field? How can they come up with some stat that says women are better programmers if you've got (pulling number out of air) 1 woman to every 1000 men in the field? How about a statement like "a percentage of women who become programmers and are successful at it (as in my experience a lot are not, but that's no different than men), tend to be better programmers than men"
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Re:Do women write better code? (Score:5, Insightful)
Inept male programmers have an easier time hiding in the crowd. Inept women programmers can't.
Because of this culling effect, the women that are still around are, on average, more capable.
Industries dominated by women have a similar effect. The males end up being better because they need to overcome the inherent prejudice to get the same performance review.
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