Women are better

.. or not?

It is apparently one of these days today. Two remarkable male - female controversies in the IT arena pop up. Totally unrelated.

First: Molly

Molly Holzschlag reports about an event that is to be held at Hooter's. A "Geek Meet". Clearly the organizers only expect men to attend. The women that will be around are only there to be gazed and looked at.

Seems a bit retarded to set up such a meeting there. Especially when someone comments that the food isn't particularly good.

Second: WSJ

And from the opposite corner on comes the Wall Street Journal with an article citing Emma McGrattan, the senior vice-president of engineering for computer-database company Ingres–and one of Silicon Valley’s highest-ranking female programmers. She states that men and women write code differently.

Sounds fair enough: we are different after all in many respects so why not in the area of writing code.

Wall Street Journal

Men Write Code from Mars, Women Write More Helpful Code from Venus

But ...

Women write more helpful code

Women, supposedly write more helpful code. Code that's clarified by many lines of comment showing someone who has to work with code later a road map of the principles behind the code. Men like to keep it cryptic to show off how good they are.

Emma McGrattan

Women are more touchy-feely and considerate of those who will use the code later. Men, on the other hand, have no such pretenses. Often, they try to show how clever they are by writing very cryptic code

Well, having worked on code from others I have learned that putting in comment is very helpful for the next developer. I have taughht myself to insert comments whenever the code becomes a bit fuzzy. And sometimes I put my thoughts, my design into comments first.

Intialize this, loop through all items, return result

things like that.

I have not much experience with female developers (there aren't that many around) and the one I have worked with was pretty solid. I do agree on that point. But to state that in general men try to write a scryptic as possible where women write touchy-feely code ... It's just a bit over the top.

The battle has just begun

What both these articles have in common is that there is still a lot of misunderstanding in battle of the sexes in teh IT arena. Some men hardly realizes that there are women in this line of field. Some women apparently need to make clear that they are oncemore the superior race, which is a pretty strange thing to claim when you are battling for emancipation.

Web Standards and growing pains

.. or is there no growth?

Molly Holzschlag has done it and again and yet again. She has raised a concern that has been brought up by others: "WTF are W3C and WHAT WG and HTML 5 WG up to? Are they completely from another planet? Are they disconnected from the real world end users and developers?"

Molly Holzschlag

Are you all just dumbed down by the fact you’ve got a job or what? Tell me. Let’s fix it. W3C, WaSP, whatever. We have problems.

Are there problems in this arena? Is it a bit of piled up frustration that has exploded? Or what?

Anyhow, the post triggered an enormous amount of comments and discussion (or at least poking at each other). Hence, follow up posts from Molly.

Plenty of storm

Reading most of the comments it mighht appear that there could be huge issues out there and that the world wide web is going to fall apart.

That sounds really, really awful.

In comes the King!

But then Jeffrey Zeldman puts me and hopefully all of us with our feet back on the ground with his post.

His point is that it is really easy to say that there is so much wrong with all the upcoming specs being compiled and coming out. But screaming murder without pointing out what exactly is wrong does nothing to help resolve the case.

That it takes long to compile specifications and have these in definitive state is something that makes sense. It's not making the menu for a Christmas dinner party with you and your parents. It's more like making a menu for a Christmas dinner for all your relatives. Each with their own diets and things they do not like to eat. And then also invite those Jewish people from across the street. And your Muslim colleague. And make sure everyone gets the right food prepared the right way and the right portion. Don't serve the Muslim wine, the Jew no ham, the vegetarian no meat at all. That is something like putting together a specification for HTML 5 is like, I guess.

Yes, it takes long to compile such a menu and I understand that the guests are getting hungry, but when it is finished each will have a great time and will experience a wonderful dinner and have their bellies filled with satisfaction.

It's not as bad as it seems

Molly in her third posts concludes in a way that's typical to her.

Molly Holzschlag

Is my approach passionate? You bet, and if you know me, it’s clear that the day that passion goes away I know I will have ceased to be effective in any way in this industry and I will leave it. But that day isn’t today. It’s a warm summer evening in Redmond, Washington, and I’m going to take some fresh lemons and make lemonade.
Anybody want a glass?

Roho

Well, it's clouded here so I will stick with a cup of cappucino.

Cheers, Molly!