Tech Status Quo

What a question. Is there actually a chance that women, rather than men, code to “help” the next person that works on the same project? According to the Wall Street Journal that chance does exist, and women continually create better commented programs than men.

According to Emma McGrattan, senior VP of Ingres over in Silicon Valley,

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 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.

Ughh.. what? Men obfuscate code on purpose to look cryptic? Not only does that make zero sense, it is incredibly prejudiced. Nobody in their right mind creates cryptic code - which, conveniently, is usually impossible to decrypt in a year by the same person. Rather than making this a gender debate, Ms. McGrattan should have just presented what she believes the ideal coding semantics are to inculcate bad programmers.

Tag this at Technorati: bad programming, comments, prejudice

Asynchronous Ruby and XML.  You heard it folks, Asynchronous Ruby.  Guess who is pushing it?  Yeap, Microsoft.  It will be completely integrated into the Silverlight package that Microsoft is failing miserably to spread across the internet.  Frankly, why would they succeed in getting programmers to use Silverlight - Microsoft still uses Flash.

Can ARAX overcome the overwhelming appeal of AJAX?  I doubt it, mostly after reading the following:

Indeed, Galbraith said, “As long as Windows/Office dominates Microsoft’s balance sheet, these cross-platform Microsoft plays always feel a bit like the story of the boy who upon encountering a rattlesnake picks it up after it promises not to hurt him, upon which the snake promptly bites. After the boy protests, the snake says: ‘You knew what I was when you picked me up.’ No matter what capabilities Silverlight may have, I think most of us in the community simply wouldn’t dream of embracing architectures dependent on Microsoft’s goodwill to support other OS vendors.”

Dion Almaer, the other co-founder of Ajaxian.com, said, “It is interesting to note that you have been able to use JRuby to run Ruby in the browser for quite some time … IronRuby is great. Getting more languages into the browser is great.”