Do Women Write Better Code? 847
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. "
McGrattan's Blog (Score:5, Informative)
Re:well, hire a bunch of women (Score:1, Informative)
- there fixed it for you
Re:Not my experience (Score:1, Informative)
Even if true (Score:4, Informative)
Another woman works here now. IF they finish arguing in an hour, it's not because they've come to a conclusion, it's because their throats are sore. They still can't even decide on some simple coding standards that the rest of us have already just been sort of using.
Women together generally makes for a bad experience.
These are just things I've noted, nothing sexist about it.
Re:Since the whole article is based on anecdotes.. (Score:1, Informative)
>for (unsigned int i=0;ij;i = i + 1)
This loop starts at zero and keeps incrementing by one as long as the variable ij is non-zero. Your male colleague is an idiot.
yes (Score:3, Informative)
I wouldn't know ... (Score:4, Informative)
That's a bad thing.
However, compensating by ascribing generic traits to gender (tidyness, empathy, etc) is not going to help, and IMHO this is exactly what this VP does.
I'm glad I don't work for her. She seems quite sexist.
early programmers were female (Score:5, Informative)
At one of my early summer jobs in a large corporation there was a gender split between "scientists and engineers" and "programmers". The guys did write code on large "coding sheets" of paper. But the females programmed keypunched the coding sheets, submitted the job decks and collected the printouts, and the guys would analyze the printouts. You were lucky to get one or two turn-arounds a day. The new people had did their own programming on teletypes of terminals (inverted 1974) in school, so declined programming assistants. Some theold guys NEVER touched a keyboard in their careers. They were either promoted into management or laid off during the late 20th century corporate restructurings.
So early programming acquired the "taint" of effeminity and being "trade" taught in vocation school. That taint delayed computer science from becoming as degree offereing at places like MIT, Stanford, and Harvard, some untilt he 1980s. I attended all three of those schools and remember the faculty debates about this. Computer scientists hid out in other departments, typically math and electrical engineering. I guess it was when you started seeing coding superstars like Don Bricklin and Bill Gates (yes Bill wrote a legendary BASIC compiler OFF-LINE that worked within a day of finally getting the hardware) that commercial computer science became more acceptable.
Re:Sexual orientation and coding style? (Score:3, Informative)
1. Correctness. If the code doesn't work (as it was supposed to have been designed to do) then it's wrong. It doesn't matter how beautiful it is. I've worked with people who have provided a library plus API for some functionality and I've been unable to get it to work EVER. They've claimed that they've tested it. I've been unable to find any case that works. In the end I was forced to rewrite it from scratch. (I've yet to receive any beautiful code that fails like this - unless you count pretty boxes for comments and correctly indented as beautiful)
2. Robustness. I'm not talking about ability to handle unexpected input here - that comes under correctness. I'm talking about if someone needs to make a change in the future to support some new requirements, how robust is the code to a small change leaving (most of) the old functionality still working correctly. Many many years ago I remember working on some code (DOS code to drive hardware over serial port) that had some timing constraints (of the order of 1/100s) but nothing exceptionally difficult to achieve even in those days. The code mostly worked (although it failed intermittently) but was so sensitive to changes that moving a bit of functionality out into a subroutine would affect the timing enough to cause it to fail most of the time. In the end, the only solution was to rewrite from scratch.
3. Clarity. Once the other two are fulfilled then clarity is important. But most of the time it's pretty hard to fulfill both 1 and 2 without also giving 3. Mostly 3 becomes alerting people to weird quirks in the code that have been done for a reason but aren't necessarily obvious at first glance. Comments are dangerous because they can be wrong even if the code is correct and robust. The very best code is correct, robust and doesn't need comments at all. Comments can break 2 - a small change to the code can silently break the comment. If the comment is at a high enough level then comments can sometimes be robust against small changes to the code. And some things are impossible to do in a small compact piece of code - then you need a small compact comment to give you the overview. Sometimes low level comments are required in code because requirements have changed so variable or function names no longer make sense in the new context. Of course, in an ideal world, we'd go and fix all those names everywhere.
Tim.
Re:Do women write better code? (Score:5, Informative)
I've always held Grace Hopper [wikipedia.org] in high regard myself. She was involved in the development of the first compiler for COBOL, as well as the language itself. She also pushed for standards in computing, and is at least partially responsible for the term "bug" in software. On top of all that she was a Rear Admiral in the Navy. What more could you want in a woman? She was truly one of the greatest female geeks in history.
Re:Do women write better code? (Score:3, Informative)
No she is not. The term goes all the way back to Shakespeare, and was in common use in Edison's time. The fact that she even made such lasting mention of the real bug stuck in the relay was because everyone was already likely to get the joke.
Re:Do women write better code? (Score:2, Informative)
A simple Statistical effect (Score:3, Informative)