Women write more expressive, sensitive code

It seems what this person is trying to articulate is documentation, not code. Computers don't understand documentation, so there's not much point in programmers writing it. Analysts and tech writers write documentation, which no one reads.

It is an amusing thing to see industry attempt to whip women into computing when they have so little interest in it. It's just a shame that it is the fashion to put down men in one way or another in order to encourage the wee lasses.

"McGrattan berates men for trying, “to show how clever they are by writing very cryptic code,” whereas women just want to be understood."

If a man had made a similar statement, he would be vilified, yet a woman gets a pass and is even applauded when she makes her bigotry a norm.

Sign of the times, I guess.

They should see some of my code if they want expressive...

The comments and function names leave no doubt to what I think of the idiot that designed the database I'm working with!

As a male....and a programmer

Comments are a necessity when working as a team and by yourself to save time....for others to know what you where doing and for yourself if you comeback to a project a few months or just weeks later.

However, Excessive comments detract from ability to quickly tell what a program is supposed to do and unnecessarily bulk up the code.

And over working the comments just waste time of the commenter and the reader so please just KISS.

...old rubbish.

Put the kettle on love.

Perhaps Microsoft should hire some female programmers. Maybe that way they could get rid of the bloat. (I know, I know... what can I say, I've been in the business for so long, I AM a Neandrathal).

As it seems now Microsoft must have an excess of redneck programmers, always sitting around, sucking down beers, and generally getting rather rotund, like their code.

very cryptic code = very compact and efficient code not everyone can write

This topic is silly. 

The difference is between programmers who only program, and programmers who have to maintain their code.

You want programmers who explain their code well? Start them off fixing bugs, with instructions to document everything they have to figure out for themselves.


Female Humans have been following weaker Males about since History began. If You don't think Data Can Snarfu Garflock, Maybe your Invisible.

Tape recorder is best clue as to what caused one solution to Diagramatic job order. Better yet, fantastic numbers of subroutines ready to plug in. Saves Thinking & Works Better.

Most hon Engineers are involved in ONE Thing, Insurance Fraud & couldn't design Wet Noodle Contest, let alone Lock. 
Women in Dispare, give up after umteen bunch o' rapes & start raising Chickens back on farm in Shoe Boxs. Something theres Way too much of. 
Women Would Honestly try to figure out Right from Wrong, Something Expert Witness could never be allowed.

Once Female controls Males Invented Mechanisms, its straight to Pay Booth & too BAD For You. Also MONEY Then Spent On how one feels & often just Shiney giveaway & Complete Loss, for all that effort.
FEMALE:Its Milatary & Glamorous, Yet its futile. Women use Data to Conscript Very Young MEN (UnMarriaging$,Property & Idea Swiping, Your Life), Then Dump Data Base When It Gets obviously Full of lies. 
Continuing Crummy Old flRag Saugie & Expecting NON Home enviorment(Church) to Produce Genius(themselves). Genius of Thieft,LifeShortingness & lack of any other Reason.True Rural Township with greasy fingers.
Stewie Drashek

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -- -export-a-crypto-system-sig Diffie-Hellman-2-lines
($g,$e,$m)=@ARGV,$m||die"$0 gen exp mod\n";print`echo "16dio1[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d
*La1=z\U$m%0]SX$e"[$g*]\EszlXx+p|dc`

[copied in random from http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/rsa/perl-dh.html]

print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

[http://world.std.com/~franl/crypto/rsa-guts.html]

Now do this in COBOL or ABAP with MOVE-CORRESPONDINGs that are more expressive :)

I have seen a fair share of very well documented and expressive code that would repeatedly fill 250GB of Oracle temp space. A SQL statement reads much better if you put all of your limiters in a HAVING clause, use cartesian products rather than joins and just over overcome the Trillion rows returned by grouping on every field while sorting every subquery.

too bad the code produced rarely contains correct logic, even though it may be "expressively" written.

last time I checked, we still did not have too many cases of computers able to comprehend emotion, especially in the context of programming environments.

As a female developer who rarely comments code (and is fully aware that anecdote <> proof), I would like to cry foul on this. I'd much rather give entities meaningful names and write tight, efficient and short code than litter my code with comments. The only parts that I'll comment are parts that I think I may have trouble remembering why I did them in the way that I did so that I don't attempt to rewrite them in a blaze of brainwave later on. My documentation, on the other hand, is a masterpiece of literature and beauty and has often reduced grown men to tears through its insightful, emotional depths. If someone reading your code can't work out what it does then they maybe need more training.

Agree with Augustine.

"men feel absolutely no compunction whatsoever to explain what" Incorrect use of 'compunction'. Try 'need' or 'motivation', instead. Or "Men feel absolutely no compunction whatsoever about not explaining..."

com·punc·tion [kuhm-puhngk-shuhn] 
–noun 1. a feeling of uneasiness or anxiety of the conscience caused by regret for doing wrong or causing pain; contrition; remorse. 
2. any uneasiness or hesitation about the rightness of an action.

Real Programmer's do not comment their code, if it is hard to write then it should hard to understand.

Disclaimer- The following comment was written with humorous sarcasm and tongue firmly planted in cheek. NOT to be taken seriously. 

Want evidence that Vista was written by female programmers? It was written from a female perspective:

1. Instead of a bare bones OS that can have add ons installed to add specific functionality wanted by individuals, it's a bloated mess of features that don't make any sense to anyone but the code writers who wrote it (most of whom are unlikely to be male).

2. More attention was paid to developing a visually attractive interface than increasing it's functionality without slowing it down.

3. It is difficult for men to understand. We are just supposed to somehow "know how it works".

I'd rather document the code in hierarchy - archiecture spec, behavior spec whatever and code with minimal comments to figure out whats going on. Now that's a relative thing, for someone as experienced/familair with the terms of the code I wrote, there is no point writing 'expressive' comments. I might as well spend the work hours solving something else. If the person doesn't know enough, then you've got a in-experienced/dumb person fiddling with your code which incidentally will cause problems for you than you realize - she might be a God and fix it forever or goof up and screw it up badly. The bottom line is -comments don't make up good programmers. Every programmer knows it.

Fortunately for me my manager agrees.


10 PRINT "GET BACK IN THE KITCHEN AND MAKE ME SOME PIE"
20 GOTO 10

The hostility in these comments typifies the bad reputation of programmers. Believing that everyone thinks the same way is a flawed assumption. I fully agree with the commenter who said trying to fix others' code will break this attitude. In those situations, every comment - even if terse and unemotive - is golden. And I'm male.

This is how they code:
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/real_programmers.png

I don't believe such a thing as women programmers exists. Tits or GTFO.

The comments made by McGrattan are a steaming pile of bollocks. Men don't aim to write cryptic code, just the most efficient and I expect most decent females do too.

Hell we're specifically taught at University not to be waffly and comment everything. Instead as Amanda said above, one should use meaning for variable and function names etc. Almost no commenting should be necessary, other than to explain some design choices or very briefly clarify complex chunks of code.

Real programmers have to maintain the code they wrote, or go maintain code someone else wrote.
Cryptic code is good for academics who have time to ponder how such and such a function can be made in a minimal amount of instructions. They're the ones who can awe themselves with the "beauty" of code.
The rest of us grunts have to get things working yesterday, so that code better be clearly written and easy to understand, otherwise it'll be hell six months down the line when a correction is required !

DELETE 
FROM UNIVERSE 
WHERE NAME = ‘c64roxxors’
AND CLASSIFICATION= ‘KNOBHEAD’

Comments shouldn't explain the WHAT - if that's not clear from the code, then the programmer needs to be "re-educated".

What is important is the WHY - which can't be explained in code. Somebody commented about Oracle and SQL - my feelings about Relational Databases are unprintable, I work with a post-relational database which is SOOO much better, but a very important thing with comments is to explain things like "actually, you can't do that (which looks much more sensible) because the real world just doesn't behave like that!"

That's actually my beef with relational - it's a wonderful (and useful) theory, but unfortunately it doesn't describe the real world very well and forcing the real world into the relational model makes for very heavy programming - "make it as simple as possible, but no simpler", said Einstein. Like strict Pascal, relational is TOO simple.

Cheers,
Wol