Do women code with a heart?
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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.
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Jessieroo said
am June 16 2008 @ 11:36 am
Leaving aside gender-biased reasons for being nurturing or not, perhaps Ms. McGrattan has a point: on some subconscious level (probably as the result of socialization, but perhaps not) women approach code-writing differently than men. Would this surprise you? People tend to approach given problems in different mindsets depending on their training (education and socialization included), I find this logical. Does this mean that codes written by females are less cryptic? It may appear that way, but this could be the result of taking a different approach and not necessarily the result of some unsaid desire to be cooperative.
Mike said
am June 30 2008 @ 1:51 pm
Well, has Emma McGrattan come across women who do things the ‘manly’ way? As science has it that most women who perform well in men’s work or fields have to some extend male traits (a sizeable amount of male hormones) but women are naturally better communicators than men so the same is evident in programming/coding.
Let her not make this another debate on gender superiority.
http://memoments.blogspot.com/
http://youtechno.blogspot.com/
http://niche-audience.blogspot.com/