It would be great to get contributions from you and other women. There could be a number of projects which include front end tools to enhance Ingres usability.

Cheers,
Dean

And I’m curious as to whether the rename column alluded to is rename restrict, or rename cascade; the latter ought to be a good trick!

As for the men vs women coder thing: aside from the fact that the WSJ blog entry doesn’t appear to quite match up with what you said in your own blog entry (journalists at work!), I’d have to say that in my experience over the last thirty-three-yikes years, gender is of much, MUCH less relevance than basic coding competence. I.e. the spread between good and bad coders is huge, orders of magnitude larger than the spread between good men coders and good women coders. I have a notion that at the top end, men have a very minor “goodness” advantage in my experience, but I’d be hard pressed to prove it. This pales in comparison to good-vs-bad coders, which can cover several orders of magnitude range in just about any metric you care to imagine.

Paul

If a male tech executive were to make a similar remark, implying that code written by men tends to be superior to code written by women, it would ignite such a firestorm that he would be driven from his job, as happened to Larry Summers at Harvard. You needn’t worry, however, because gender stereotyping is always acceptable when it casts women in a more favorable light than men. Just note the approving tone of the article that was written about your remark.

We read the article “Men Write Code from Mars, Women Write More Helpful Code from Venus” and realized we would have to contact you as it seems we have similar goals. We are the founders of an organization called Duchess, which is a network for female Java programmers. One of our goals is to get more women to program in Java. It would be nice if we could exchange ideas sometime.

Kind regards,

Clara Ko and Linda van der Pal
(the Netherlands)