Do Women Write Better Code?
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 considerate of those who will use the code later, she says. They’ll intersperse their code-those strings of instructions that result in nifty applications and programs-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. “
(Via Slashdot)
Not surprising, really.
No, not surprising at all.
Ehhhhhh … phooey …
…after my music career tanked, I became a hardware engineer, and ended up working in a group that did both software and hardware. Some of the most “clever” and “obfuscated” code I ever saw was written by the ladies in the group. Later, when I went to work for the CAD/CAE tools support group, I saw the same type of thing … only more of it since the group was significantly larger …
The lead programmer for the CAD/CAE organization that was responsible for making sure that ONLY clean, self-documenting code was released to the user was a bloke from Switzerland, who wrote some of the most absolutely beautiful source I have ever seen.
This guy was always having style meetings and design reviews about the ladies’ code …
Bottom line: I just don’t buy the generalization.