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From: taylor@hplabs.HP.COM (Dave Taylor)
Newsgroups: comp.society
Subject: programming and gender
Message-ID: <2036@hplabsc.HP.COM>
Date: Wed, 17-Jun-87 14:40:32 EDT
Article-I.D.: hplabsc.2036
Posted: Wed Jun 17 14:40:32 1987
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[The following article is from Dan Flak and appeared in the Usenet 
newsgroup `soc.women']

I have this weird idea (about 50% of my ideas fall in this category)
Could a psychologist trained in computer programming use another
person's program as a psychoanalitical tool? (Sounds like a neat theme
for a master's thesis).

As an engineering student, I took a *whole* semester of philosophy, and
as a subset of the course we dabbled in psych. (You know, Freud, "a
thing is a phallic symbol if it's longer than it's wide").

It's really interesting to inherit other people's code and see how they
approach a particular problem. Computer languages, unlike human
languages, have a limited vocabulary and are totally unambiguous. When
a programmer writes a program, (s)he must solve a problem staying
within a very narrowly defined set of rules. Within these bounds, the
programmer is limited only by knowledge, imagination and ingenuity.

I've inherited code from both male and female programmers, and there
*is* a difference. The men tended to write "flashier" (C) code. That
is, why use 5 statements when one will do. The women tended to be more
explicit.  I've found the women's code easier to work with. (Do I think
like a woman?).  I'm all for "compacting" things when it means the
program runs faster, but in many cases, the compiler will produce the
same code if it uses 4 lines or one. The only difference is that the 4
line version is easier for the human to read and maintain (it's easier
to slip in extra statements later).

I've also found that the women tended to be more detailed in their
work.  They used more comment statements, and tested for more
"exceptional" cases.  On the other hand, the men seemed to write more
"high performance" code.  (It ran faster, and compiled into smaller
object code).

The men's projects were typically "internal" (things that the user
never actually sees on the screen) while the women's projects were more
oriented towards the user interface.

Now to "muddy" the gender issue. All of the "male" code I looked at was
written by CS Majors. Two of the three "female" codes that I looked at
were written by engineers. I am an engineer, perhaps the difference is
really due to the difference in education instead of gender. For those
of you who know C, given a equal choice between using an array or
pointers, the women usually chose arrays (FORTRAN uses them, engineers
use FORTRAN, therefore ...). The CS types tended to think pointers
first.  Engineers think of for loops before while loops, etc... Enough
of the technical differences.

Other than that there really is a wealth of information into how a
person thinks based on the code (s)he writes. Some of it is convoluted
spaghetti, some of it is simply wasteful, and some, nearly poetry. I
imagine a properly trained person could tell who had the uptight anal
stage, and who had a terrible ordeal during the Oedipal stage by
looking at code.  My analysis, by comparison must be primitive. (My
physchology is at the "See spot. See spot run" stage. Unfortunately, I
think most psychologists are at the same stage with computer
programming).

OK, flame away. When one makes statements as broad and as general as
the ones I presented above, comments of all sorts are possible. I'll
leave the general question, "Do men and women think differently?"
alone.  (Personally, I think they do). I'll ask a more cautious
question instead, "Do the differences (IF ANY) in thinking between men
and women show up in the way they write programs?"

Not exactly a great social issue, but it amuses me nonetheless.
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