We know that many of you are programmers, and so when we saw an article over at The Wall Street Journal suggesting that Men and Women code very differently from one another, we thought it might be an interesting topic to discuss.
The gist of the article is that women tend to write code that’s more helpful to people who want to tinker with it later on while men tend to write code to “show-off.” They say, “women are more touchy-feely and considerate of those who will use the code later. They’ll intersperse their code – those strings of instructions that results in nifty applications and programs – with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the liens the way they did and exactly how they did it.”
So then what do men do? They say, “men on the other hand, have no such pretense. Often they try to show how clever they are by writing very cryptic code. They try to obfuscate things in the code and don’t leave clear directions for people using it later.”
They also mentioned the fact that women programmers are a pretty rare thing which suggests that a majority of the code out there is “cryptic.” To all of you programmers out there, do you tend to comment and explain why you code the way you do or do you find yourself writing “cryptic code.”
As someone who’s never written an ounce of code, I can’t comment on this. However, Ryan codes pretty regularly and says this is a pretty bad stereotype of men. He said he tends to comment well, at least for his own sake, because when he goes back months from when he started a project and wants to change something, he wouldn’t be able to remember why he wrote something the way he did. Often times these days there are groups of people working on coding the same project, so documentation is 100% necessary, and required. Good coders tend to document properly.
Any thoughts?
Ryan comments?! Haha. I would agree that Ryan is good at commenting, having seen some of it in the past.
Unfortunately, everyone has a different style of coding/commenting/formatting to begin with, so even if someone writes simple code, it might be hard for others to read. Having never knowingly seen a women’s code, I can’t comment on that (which is rather unfortunate).
I’m not sure gender roles in this case are as cut-and-dry as the article indicates. I was a grader for undergraduate CS students for a few years and I can honestly say that as it pertains to academic programming, commenting and the easy by which I could understand the code varied not based on the gender of the person but rather on how long the person has programmed. I think that as people become better programmers, they produce better code. Does this mean that fully employed programmers who produce cryptic, hard-to-understand code may not have become “mature” (for lack of a better term) programmers? Maybe so.
In short, I agree with Ryan.
There are women programmers?
I’m not a woman, and i think comments in the code are absolutely necessary, even if you’re the only one who wants to go back. However, and i say this from my own experience, when 2 men are working on a project together (and even worse: together, live, in real-time) it really tends to go towards a showdown
I’d have to say it also depends on what exactly you’re doing. If you’re working on a small project. That kind of cryptic code, without comment, will be faster to write, so it will be more time efficient, so there’s no point in wasting more time since it’s small. If you’re working on something big, you need to invest the comment time in it, since the project will probably have a long(er) life, and you’ll feel that investment when you revisit the code (yes, no headache!
).
That’s normally the rule of thumb that I go by as well. If I think I’m going to be coming back to the code down the road I’ll definitely put in comments. Sometimes I feel as though I over-comment on some things, but it doesn’t really hurt anything.
From what I’ve seen first hand, however, is that men and women tend to take a different approach at their coding. Men like to dive in and try to rapidly prototype something, whereas women like to think through how they are going to code what they’re after. That probably means that men have to go back and insert comments after they’re done, but women can probably insert them as they go. If you wait to insert your comments you’re probably less apt to do so when you’re done coding, because you’ll likely just think of it as a waste of time.
I can definitely confirm this, at least in the cases that I’ve seen. My girlfriends at college tend to comment every function they write, even if it’s a simple one which can be understood by merely looking at the code, while us boys… well, we try our best
The same can be said of our teachers. While women usually write cleaner, more easy to understand code, including comments (which they always recommend), the men write more complex code, even more if they use something like C++, with all this geeky-prone syntax, and rarely they use any comment.
I see there are not too many female programmers around here to comment the article, though.
Unfortunately, there aren’t.
I try to make things as clear as possible and comment when it might not be. I could comment more, but then again, all the comments add bytes and I try to save on bytes too
(yes they should be removed for live code, but that’s not always feasible option) It’s a balance..
Many compilers will remove comments before compiling the code though. After all, they aren’t really needed in compiled binary code since it would just take up an unnecessary amount of room.
True, but I work with HTML, CSS & JS. No need to compile
Ahh, then yes, in that case I do normally try to minimize the comments in my code. Good point!
I used to handle of a lot of Final university projects when I
).
was very young(under 15). Interesting thing about that was the fact
that almost 80% of my customers were girls (pretty ones though
I was amazed that she was graduating, and couldn’t write a code for
her own sake… something a small boy could easily do. Maybe it’s not
their world,… of course, thats just my opinion.