Male programmers considered harmful

A couple of weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal published an article about the practice of documenting computer programs by including comments in your code. More specifically, it's about how male programmers are arrogant jerks who refuse to do this, while female programmers are "considerate of those who will use the code later." The article -- written by a woman, and citing only one source, a female executive at Ingres -- is dripping with sexist bigotry and condescension, including a jaw-dropping statement that "there's a big need to fix testosterone-fueled code at Ingres."

Judging by that article, you would think that including comments in your code is something that female programmers invented, and that males do only if their female superiors nag and browbeat them.

Of course that's totally false. When I took programming courses in the 1970s, my instructors were all male, and every one of them insisted that we document our code properly with clear and readable comments. If we failed to do so, we lost points on each assignment. Our programming textbooks all emphasized the importance of documenting your code. Every one of those textbooks was written by men.

So what we have here is nothing less than historical revisionism. Proper commenting of code was invented and championed by men in the earliest days of programming, but now Rebecca Buckman and Emma McGrattan want to rewrite history so they can claim that programming was a realm of "testosterone-fueled" barbarism until the women showed up and explained to us, in words of one syllable, how to do it properly.

This article claims that even today, men deliberately obfuscate their code "to show how clever they are." I think that any programmer who actually did this would be asked to stop, and if he continued, he would be disciplined and eventually fired.

I also think that any male vice-president of engineering who expressed scorn and contempt for female programmers, and who was quoted by the Wall Street Journal as saying that "there's a big need to fix estrogen-fueled code", would be instantly fired.

Source: Dr. Helen