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What Gender Is Your Code?

I got this off the Planet HCI wire:

Code like a girl is a humorous observation of people obsessed with beautiful code in response to Jamis Buck’s Beautiful code, test-first post. The author “stereotypes with abandon”, however is extremely funny and somewhat true (as most stereotypes are of extreme situations).

I had no problem thinking about my friends and how they code and who was very feminine in their approach to code. Many of them are very particular about their code, making it as semantic, usable, and understandable by a second set of eyes as possible. I imagine this is from their experiences of working in a team environment — however I also know plenty of developers who must write code readable/usable by others who fail miserably.

How do you code? I’m definitely a girl, I pay a lot of attention to semantics, comment format, and indentation. It helps others read my code, but also myself when I reference it in the future. If this were applied to any other aspect of my life, I’d be a guy — I’m incredibly messy and unorganized without my computer :)

seele :: Jun.15.2006 :: General, Humor :: 5 Comments »

5 Responses to “What Gender Is Your Code?”

  1. on 15 Jun 2006 at 2:31 pm1Kevin Krammer

    My point of view on this is that software development is very similar to architecture.

    Architects are obviously an engineers, they design buildings.
    However, it is also common to see architects as some kind of artists.

    The only difference is that the art in software is even more hidden, hidden in the code, usually only obvious to other software developers.

    IMHO “Girl code” is a really stupid categorization, it’s like saying a house is a “Girl house” just because one can’t see the bare concrete.

  2. on 16 Jun 2006 at 2:31 am2Thomas Zander

    Hi Celeste

    Hahaha, girl code; now thats a name I have not seen before. :)
    It makes sense, in a way. Creating a work of beauty or creating a work of function.
    But, hang on; does that mean that men can’t be beautiful? Or are you assuming there are only male programmers (straight men, even)? Hmm..

    I personally liked this article http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html
    He explains how hackers have to be a creative lot to actually produce a program thats any good. Much like a painter.

    I disagree with Kevin that all of it is ‘inside’. Beauty shines not only in code quality but also outward to the application itself in many ways. Maintaining and expanding software means to read code, so there will be less flaws visible from the outside in code thats been constructed to be gorgeous internally :)

  3. on 16 Jun 2006 at 7:18 am3What Gender Is Your Compiler?

    10 Reasons Why Compilers Must Be Female
    =======================================

    1. Picky, picky, picky.
    2. They hear what you say, but not what you mean.
    3. Beauty is only shell deep.
    4. When you ask what`s wrong, they say “nothing”.
    5. Can produce incorrect results with alarming speed.
    6. Always turning simple statements into big productions.
    7. Smalltalk is important.
    8. You do the same thing for years, and suddenly it`s wrong.
    9. They make you take the garbage out.
    10. Miss a period and they go wild.

  4. on 16 Jun 2006 at 8:00 am4seele

    I think the parallel that is trying to be made between ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ code is both in presentation and preparation. In an unrestrained stereotype, women are known to be constantly preening themselves, touching up make up here and there, stopping and looking in a mirror to make sure every hair is in place, smoothing their clothing, etc. in order to look the best they can. When men are peculiar about their code and are constantly picking at its syntax and appearance in order to create better presentation — that is when they have ‘girl’ code.

    So the next time you see beautifully formatted code in SVN, I doubt it was a girl coding, just a very metrosexual programmer ;)

  5. on 16 Jun 2006 at 12:02 pm5Brad

    ‘Girly’ code, I think mostly (at this moment in time) tells about a male’s devotion to a piece of machine or technical design, not any devotion to creating attractive code in order for it to attract or present something (which is both the case for woman trying to look better). The consistency and readability of a piece of code mainly serves just those two logical reasons. It’s not styled to present or appear, it’s styled for a function. When a guy pays allot of detail to coding style, then he will usually have plenty of explanations reasoning his particular style. I think it mirrors the creators or maintainers care and dedicated attention for the whole thing, but it does not by definition define it’s logical quality, which in software ultimately matters the most.

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