Emma McGrattan, the senior vice-president of engineering for computer-database company Ingres–and one of Silicon Valley’s highest-ranking female programmers–insists that men and women write code differently. Women are more touchy-feely and considerate of those who will use the code later, she says. They’ll intersperse their code–those strings of instructions that result in nifty applications and programs–with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the lines the way they did and exactly how they did it.
The code becomes a type of “roadmap” for others who might want to alter it or add to it later...
Did she just say I code like a girl? My pursuit of writing maintainable code is really an exploration of my feminine side? That is quite the flamebait Mrs. McGratten treated the nerdiverse on. :)
Her goal is noble, but I think Agile is wasted on Ingress:
In an effort to make Ingres’s computer code more user-friendly and gender-neutral, McGrattan helped institute new coding standards at the company. They require programmers to include a detailed set of comments before each block of code explaining what the piece of code does and why; developers also must supply a detailed history of any changes they have made to the code. The rules apply to both Ingres employees and members of the open-source community who contribute code to Ingres’s products.
My question to you: Do you get anything done? Or is 90% of time spent on adding code-pretties?
