There's one source, and she's...playa hating, to say the least.

Advocating underrepresented minorities is like riding a tank. It's fun, nobody will disagree with you, and if a "tank man" (cf. Tiananmen square) shows up, you can effectively lynch him (cf. Lawrence Summers, James Watson).

Now, blatant reverse sexism aside, is the writer correct? There's one source, who may be an itsy-bit biased, but yeah, I believe it. It could be true that women document more. I don't think that they're categorically superior coders, though, as this article seems to imply, and I'm not exactly eager to work at that database company.

Hmm.. I know I wouldn't last there long. My first reaction would be to explain my problems like this:

It was a dark and stormy node; the files served from torrents -- except for occasional intervals when checked by a violent gust of spam which swept up the subnet (for it is in the colo that our scene lies), rattling along the interfaces, and fiercely invalidating the scanty lines of the caches that struggled against the load.

If not, I can only assume that women has never met Steve Yegge.

Sine there are far fewer women programmers, I would expect the average female programmer to be better than the average male - including being better at documenting code.

However the article sounds like she is only basing it on anecdotal evidence. It would be quite interesting to see a more scientific study.

/ * gets the variable */

int getVariable() {...}

I could scream and climb up walls when I see that or worse, have to write that. If you don't write the comment, though, some fascist "quality control" algorithm will show a read flag and make the managers unhappy.

I thought the consent by now was that understandable code is to be preferred over comments, especially since comments have a tendency to become stale.

Despite the fact that absolutely no details were provided in the article about her standards, or what she's trying to achieve (other than a few "pithy" interpretations by the author), you've jumped to the conclusion that it's "micromanagement bullshit". You've also taken the most absurd interpretation of her remarks. Why? I'm quite confident that any experienced developer knows the difference between your example, and good documentation practices. Since this particular woman has managed to rise to a position of high authority, perhaps we should give her the benefit of the doubt, hmm?

Anyway...if they weren't so sad, the anguished geek cries of "sexism" in this thread would be hilarious. It's hard to be oppressed by discrimination when you're in the clear and obvious majority.

I feel confident enough from my experience to say that her commenting rules are bullshit. I gave the reasons, too: comments are bad because they go stale. Enforced comments lead to ridiculous comments and tedious typing work that is resented by developers. If she really has found a way around that, it would be sensational, I would love to read an article about it. If she has several mandatory comment fields in the code, it is essentially just a TPS report translated to coding. Before you can write any code, you have to fill in a form - that can't be fun, not matter if the boss is male or female.

Maybe she is still a super-coder, it is not as if she is the only one coming up with awful rules in face of the unsolved problem of managing IT projects. Most managers probably resort to such means eventually (that's why the TPS report joke exists), and then forget to switch back when it doesn't work out. That is why big companies become horrible work places in the long run. Now she works for a big company, so maybe she does a good job for that environment - I don't mean that as demeaning, I guess somebody had to do the corporate stuff (I actually envy corporate folks for their endurance and staying power). I merely pointed out that I loathe that kind of thing. If you like it, more power to you.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but this really has nothing to do with sexism. On the other hand, you display exactly the kind of "political correctness" that makes people resent issues like sexism, because it is just used as a manipulative tool (you can always brush off criticism by crying "sexism").

Where do you read that? I have not referred to her remarks in any way, I only referred to the practice of enforced comments in general. I don't even know if she's a Java Developer.

I see this kind of commenting every day, from experienced developers, too. There are now tools that run automatically (like during the nightly build) and rise red flags if a Java method doesn't have comments, so people write those stupid comments to shut up the tool. I have also seen the "get the value" comments in enterprise level open source projects. It is the way developers kill time these days.

Unless you work for her, or know her personally, you have no idea what kind of coding standards she's trying to enforce. You've referenced her management and called it bullshit, because you've assumed that she's doing absurd things that you've experienced on bad projects in the past.

That is more than enough to make a judgment in that case.

Requiring a "detailed set of comments before each block of code" doesn't imply that the comments have to be there if they're inane.

I've said that you're jumping to conclusions, and implied that your reaction to this one woman is hostile, but I've never accused you of being sexist. Perhaps you need to take a step back and re-read what I've written.

"I think the comments here do a better job of reflecting the problems women are up against as coders [...] if they weren't so sad, the anguished geek cries of "sexism" in this thread would be hilarious. It's hard to be oppressed by discrimination when you're in the clear and obvious majority."

If I somehow misinterpreted that, my apologies - english is just my second language.

However the more complex and clever the code get, the more you need comments. Note that Knuth, one of the smartest and manliest programmers, invented literate programming.

We have no idea whether the woman in question demand stupid superfluous rote comments, or rather want well-documented API's or literate code ala Knuth.

BTW. I think the Inquirers slant on the article is clearly sexist, but also that she brought it upon herself by framing the issue in terms of men vs woman.

It is just my theory, I have never seen any statistical evidence one way or the other.

I used to be a big proponent of comments too, until I realized that having the right variable and function names makes for much better documentation. Any time a chunk of code gets complicated enough for you to feel you need to comment it, you should just abstract it into another function. If you look at arc.arc it is very much written in this fashion.

The problem with comments is that they are not tightly coupled to the implementing code .. if someone comments something and then someone else comes along and changes the code without changing the comment, and then someone else comes along and tries to figure out the code by reading the comment ...

//Get the HttpSession from request.

HttpSession session = request.getSession();

To anyone who knows Java, that comment is just a waste of space that gets in the way.

(Yes, I accused a woman of being sexist. If that doesn't make sense to you please Google sexism instead of bothering me.)

I'd think I'd trade 80% of the sexist men in this industry for a few more sexist women.

Conclusion: we live in parallel universes. That, or single points of data aren't all that useful to a discussion.

I just consider dev-shops that are female dominated to be Black Swans. They haven't happened, and they are unlikely to exist right now, but they certainly could have occurred if some social factors were different, and they certainly might in the future...