It's not quite clear from your question what your primary motive is for learning new languages. From your post in general and the statement:

Quote:

Recently I started considering branching out. I figured I could take what I know about programming in a MS spreadsheet world and leverage that to Google Drive and OpenOffice, mainly to start learning more mainstream languages, e.g. Python and Javascript.

I get the idea that you might be driven primarily be a desire to advance your career. The desire to learn mainstream languages seems to be geared towards making yourself more appealing to employers. However, from statements like:

Quote:

Of course, I am interested in your opinions as to which language(s) to go after to build more knowledge and understanding, whether you think this is a fool's errand, etc etc.

I get the sense that maybe you are interested in learning more for its own sake. That is to say you find computer programming interesting and you want to understand it at a deeper and more fundamental level. Of course, these two things are not mutually exclusive and with many things the truth may be a combination of both. However, it is probably still a worthwhile question to ask yourself if your goal is to go fast or to go far. In either case the question of which language to learn may not be the best one. If you are hungry for career advancement the first question you have to answer is, how will I demonstrate or provide proof of my new skills? You can spend every free minute you have over the next year studying and practicing a language like Java to the point that you become fairly proficient. However, if you send out a cold resume to someone and simply claim, "I know Java", the chance of getting an interview is slim. There are ways with varying degrees of effectiveness to try and solve the how to get a job without experience and how to get experience without a job conundrum. It might be solvable by networking. If you know someone or someone who knows someone who will give merit to your claim that you know a language then this might not be a problem. You could also look to publish some of your personal projects or contribute to open source software. You could also take a course from a reputable institution. There is even some evidence that a few progressive companies are giving some small weight to MOOC course completion. However, if you like your current employer and the pos

Mycroft Holmes wrote:

You are describing the difference between open source and CP, here your crap is reviewed and the therefore the quality is somewhat higher and that is the reason CP is so valuable.

I may be willing to concede that the quality of code in an average CP article is higher than that of a randomly selected open source project but I don't think that's what makes CP so valuable. Honestly, with the 10 million member celebration I've been thinking about whether CodeProject is still relevant after all these years and what exactly is its purpose or mission. I've been having trouble coming up with positive answers to these questions. Judging by some of the other comments CP might be valuable mostly to authors. It seems to serve as a one stop place to have your code thoughtfully peer reviewed. However, as a place to find code to use in your own projects or as a place to learn about coding in general, I'm somewhat skeptical. I frequently make use of code from Stack Overflow and open source projects but I can not think of a single instance where I have used CP code in any of my software. In all fairness, the lack of utility I've found may have more to do with the fact that CP is C# focused, I haven't programmed in C# in years, rather than because it lacks in any objective measure of value. However, my point is that quality does not equal value. In this case, CP failed to even attempt to address the problem Marc had. We all hate software managers who push quantity over quality but next to infinite loops the biggest bottleneck in any piece of software is the code that isn't written. As long as it takes more time to write high quality code than low quality code and the demand for code outstrips the supply we are doomed to be awash in a sea of poor code. This seems completely unrelated to whether or not we can see those errors because the code is open source. Perhaps I misread, but I detected a note of animosity towards open source in your reply. Maybe like many you are afraid that open source software will steal your lunch. Maybe you have every right to be angry because open source software ate your baby. Regardless of whether your reaction is justified I think you are making an unfair comparison in this case. You are comparing a single open source project in its fledgling stages to CP, a mature community which has been in existence for twelve years and now has ten million members. If you look at the code of an open source project of a simila

Maybe you could help me because I'm uncertain what makes you feel this is such a remarkable event. Is it because the student in question is from Mongolia? If you are like me the first association that comes to mind when you think of Mongolia is a semi-literate, nomadic, horse people living in yurts. Of course, if I actually stop to think about it I realize this is a ridiculous characterization based on outdated ideas. If the student were from London, England or Seoul, South Korea do you think you would have found the story less remarkable?

Quote:

Buttushig had: "never received any special education abroad."

This quote seems to suggest that it is impossible to receive a decent education within Mongolia. The insinuation being a child educated in Mongolia can not be on par with a western educated child. Is Mongolia really that far behind, especially the capital? I don't know. But, given this child had internet access and, from what I can tell from the pictures, a decent electronics lab in which to work my sense is that my view of Mongolia is much further behind than Mongolia actually is. Hans Rosling does a good job exploring and exploding this type of bias in his Ted talk "The Best Stats You've Ever Seen" [^]. Maybe the piece of this story that really elevates it to the status of remarkable is the fact that the student in question is 15. But how are we to rate the performance of a 15 year old? For this to be remarkable it has to be different from what we expect for a such a person. At first glance, this does appear to be a performance beyond that of an average 15 year old. But, how are we determining what to expect on average?. It seems we are basing it upon an average child who has received an average education. However, this raises the question, does an average education raise a child anywhere near their true potential? In his talk, "How Schools Kill Creativity" [^], Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and strong argument that they don't. Is it really surprising or remarkable in any way that a student who has a natural and strong interest in electronics and who is given access to an intelligent, dedicated teacher actually masters the basics of the subject? Wouldn't it be much more surprising if he didn't?

Congratulations! Of all the sexist jokes this thread has inspired yours was the only I found funny. As a caricature of attitudes about women it was excellent.

To Christian: I woke up to a reply to my reply to your reply to my initial post. I wanted to continue the conversation because you raised some interesting points but your reply seems to have disappeared. I will make my comments hear. Hopefully, you don't mind.

Quote:

we have interviews in the past days, and *we* did select 2 boys and 1 girl for internship. The selection was done by merit alone, so ... supposing I am biased (read: sexist swine) is not correct IMHO. If there were 4 girls with top scores, I'd voted for get all 4.

I think you and I have different definitions of what it means to be sexist. You seem to have the view that if I'm not doing something overt like telling a women to her face that she is a stupid piece of trash or demanding that all women stay home cooking and cleaning for their husbands then I am not a sexist. Basically for me, being sexist means assuming a perceived difference between a man and a woman is caused by the presence or absence of a Y chromosome even when there is no credible evidence to support this. The test for whether or not someone exhibits sexist behavior is not simply whether or not they offer a woman a job. Just because in this instance you did the right thing and hired a woman based on objective criteria does not guarantee you are not a sexist. It doesn't suggest you are one either but tomorrow when the female new hire makes her first mistake and you say to yourself, "See, I told you, women are too stupid to be programmers." I will have reason to believe you at least think like a sexist.

Quote:

I'm making a major logic error every few lines: again, you're entitled to your views, sure, but what I have done was mostly describing situations I have witnessed (and no, not singular incidents involving single persons, but more than one AND in multiple occasions). You may not agree with my post - and I feel that this is a polite characterization of what you really think :) - but describing a situation, singular or not, does not represent a logical error.

My claim that you were making major logical errors was based solely on your point 1, where you claim the vast majority of women don't know their left from their right so how can we expect them to write an if-then-else. I see two logic errors here. First you treat a premise that is false as true. Second, you draw a conclusion from that premise which is not implied by it. Look I'll give you the benef

MehGerbil wrote:

I don't think un-answerable hypothetical questions about the past are helpful. The fact is, nobody knows what the impact would have been had Marie Curie been a wet nurse. Your rhetorical question implies you know the answer. You do not.

First let me say that I did not intend the questions to be rhetorical. If we were talking face to face I would fully expect to hear your answer. Clearly, if I was hoping to hear your answer I also do not share your view that the questions are inherently unanswerable. I was merely asking you to share your beliefs on whether or not women had made valuable and significant contributions to computing and science in the past. The only way I see this as being unanswerable is if you have no beliefs. As far as whether or not such a line is helpful I still think it would be valuable to know your views on the subject. I'm trying to understand why you are uncertain about whether the disparity between genders in technology is a problem. Is it because, like some, you don't think women really have anything to contribute in the first place? Or maybe you feel the market is already saturated with over qualified developers. Perhaps it is something else entirely. I can neither share nor alleviate your uncertainty if I don't know its source. You claim that my question implies I know the answer. With this, I also have a quibble. I think one can easily infer what my beliefs are in regards to these questions both from the context of my response and the very nature of the questions. However, I don't see how this implies that I know the answer anymore than if I were to ask you, "What time is it?" You go so far as to state unequivocally that I do not know the answer to these questions. However, by the very same logic and reasoning that you use to conclude this I can claim with certainty that you do not know that I don't know the answer. Alas, whether or not I know the answer is not the point. I am fully willing to concede that I can not say with certainty, "The world is a better place because Marie Curie was a scientist". The point I want to make is that no one can say anything with absolute certainty because there is nothing that can truly be known. We exists in a world solely of beliefs. Even if I had access to a time machine and I could go back and rerun history a million times with Marie Curie as scientist and a million times as wet nurse I could only state my beliefs as a probability distribution. 96% of the tim

For those that would like to make the case that having few women programmers is to be expected the argument boils down to two points. The women don't want to be programmers or they are unable to. You seem to largely be making the case that women are incapable of being programmers. I would first like to suggest that programming does not take any special amount of skill. The notion that it does probably comes from men wanting to feed their egos. The skills necessary to be a programmer probably boil down to about a 5th grade level of reading comprehension and a 9th grade level of math comprehension. Even children with less education than this often write their own programs. This is not to say that all of programming is so easy a child could do it. Some aspects of programming appear to be genuinely difficult. However, being hard and requiring special skill is not the same thing. Completing a marathon is hard but it does not take any particular innate skill. The large majority of people in the world could complete one if they wanted to. It only takes the will and commitment to several months of training in order to acquire the necessary conditioning to complete the race. Anyway, I consider computing to be the new literacy. I find the idea of women not being able to or wanting to program as absurd as saying women don't want to or are incapable of reading and writing. With your first sentence:

Christian Amarie wrote:

Not doing a statistic here, but here's what I collected.

you make it clear that you are aware that anecdotal evidence is not a sound basis for making a conclusion and yet you pass judgement anyway. Had you the ability to follow a point to the very last detail I think you would have found the following problems with your evidence beyond the usual pitfalls of small sample data. First, given your large bias against women it is very likely that the only women who would choose to work with you are those so lacking in skill they couldn't find a job anywhere else, doing anything else. Your female coworkers would only be those that came to your office as employment of the last resort. Attracting only the worst prospects is just one way in which a sexist environment directly and negatively impacts men. Even if the women candidates did not detect your hostility until after they were hired it is very likely that a selection bias still exists. People like to be right and it would not be surprising to find a person subconsciously selecting a

BCantor wrote:

Why would someone who doesn't a) desire to be controlling over an inanimate; b) would rather be caring for something animate (i.e., a child or their spouse); c) is not wanting to be shamed (and, candidly, is not designed/wired for dealing with such); d) nor care for something that doesn't need caring for in the first place

Let me start with C. Are you really suggesting that men like to be shamed and that men are better at handling shame than women? I don't believe it, but the majority opinion seems to be that men are incompetent at handling emotions and women are masters. If men thrive on total control and dominance, as you suggest, then shaming would be a crippling blow to their egos. Your other three points all seem to revolve around the idea that women just want to be caregivers and nothing else. However, in the early days when options for women in the workplace were extremely limited one thing that was open to them was typing. They flocked to the profession in droves because they were hungry for any opportunity they could get. Can you make the case that the mechanical act of typing is somehow synonymous with care giving? By your standards, how is typing any less of a domination of an inanimate object than programming? What kind of woman would even consider such a thing when the position of full time home maker was available? Now fast forward several years to the dawn of the computer age. At this time programming was entering code onto punch cards. Since that was basically just glorified typing much of it was performed by women. So how do you explain large numbers of women working in the profession during this period? Can you make the case that operating a punch card machine is like taking care of a baby? Time marches on and punch cards get replaced with terminals and keyboards. The act of designing a program and coding merge. Now we see an approximately equal proportion of men and women in the field of computer programming. I'd have to do some research but it appears things stayed this way until the early 80's. I don't see how programming in the 70's and 80's is anymore care-givery than programming today. If anything I would say computers today are much more like animate objects than they were back then. So what happened to all the women programmers? Well, if I were to enter into wild speculation, my hypothesis would be that sometime in the 80's computers became pervasive enough that society deemed it necessary to come u

MehGerbil wrote:

Does there need to be more women in programming? I don't grant that a lack of women is the same thing as broken.

Well I do. Let me ask you this. Do you think the world would be a better place if Marie Curie had decided to be a wet nurse rather than pursuing physics and chemistry? Or do you think we'd all be better off if Grace Hopper had relegated herself to the typing pool? To play on gender stereotypes for a minute, what if half the best programmers are women and half the best nurses are men? What do we lose as a society by having large groups of people unable to reach their potential? What do those individuals have to suffer by being shepherded into careers for which they have no particular talent or desire? Let me ask you this. Would you consider it a problem if everywhere in my program where I needed to sort something I used a bubble sort instead of a merge sort? Is it a problem to consistently do worse than what we know is the best possible? It seems to me you have two basic choices. You can consider the lack of women in programming a problem or you can try as others have to make the case that women do not have the ability or desire to be programmers and therefore the disparity is just, right, and natural. If you make the case that they don't have the desire you have to show that it is because something inherit in the creative act of programming repulses them and not that they are discouraged by the male-dominated, SoS culture that permeates the industry.

Quote:

What does it have to do with Women in programming?

Possibly everything but with only a superficial glance probably nothing. My initial reaction when seeing this application wasn't that this is some evil tool to subjugate women. I'm also reasonably confident it wasn't the intent of the developers to make an app that repels women. However, by not thoroughly considering the consequences of their choices they may have done just that. When I saw this application I imagined a work place that wholeheartedly embraced its philosophy. Then for whatever reason I started thinking about women. I imagined just about every woman I know and I couldn't think of a single one that would enjoy working in an environment like this. So I invite you to do the same. Imagine a workplace like this and then imagine the women you know working there. How many of the women you imagined have big smiles on their faces because they love their work environment? I believe that if you take a moment to imagine these two things as I did you will largely come to the same conclusions.

Yes, my apologies. I didn't notice the "S" was bold. The combination of it being with all cap text and a single letter made it invisible to me until you pointed it out. For the little that I use the forum I guess I'm accustomed to seeing edited quotes like this prefixed with something like "Did you mean..." or the edit itself being more extensive so things like strike through or italics can be used to really make it stand out. There are limits to what anyone can reasonably do to make the addition of a single character stand out. Besides not noticing the bold I guess part of the reason I felt Christian was being misquoted is the context. Had you said, "You are missing an optional S" I think I would have understood the S wasn't there originally even with no highlighting or access to the source text. "The S is optional" line makes me think you just added parentheses to Christian's use of SMILE. Of course in that case you probably would have only made the the parenthesis bold and I probably would have still missed it. It's only four words and no one can be responsible for every misinterpretation of what they write. My apologies again for my misreading.

After following the recent link in CP's daily news to the SoS[^] website I couldn't help but think, here is a perfect example of why there aren't more women in programming. I really can't speak for women, because I'm a sexist pig (and let me apologize right now to any pigs that are reading this), but I imagine the large majority of women would be completely repulsed by working in such an environment. Actually, it's hard for me to imagine anyone over the age of 25 not getting sick of it pretty quickly. I think feedback, competition, and fun are all useful tools in increasing productivity and job satisfaction but this application seems to be written with teenage boys as the audience. Everything is a competition and your ego is the stake. The whole thing seems to be geared towards saying I'm smart, I'm better than you, you're a stupid idiot. If you want to stroke your ego in such a way then go get the latest version of Halo or Call of Duty and don't waste your time diluting the experience with the pretense of work. However, if you want to build something great. Something better than what is possible alone, you have to foster collaboration. I think an application like this would actually be detrimental to the long term productivity of any software house in at least two ways besides inhibiting female participation. First, it discourages collaboration because like in a first-person-shooter where my goal is to frag my opponents I succeed when others fail. I didn't scrutinize the application but I didn't see the section where you get hero points for helping someone else. You get your jollies by boosting your own stats and laughing at the ineptness of others. Except in the most dysfunctional and juvenile environments I doubt this would lead to a total breakdown of collaboration but it would act as a gentle headwind that slowly puts your team further and further behind its potential. The second problem is that it will probably lead to the gaming of the gaming system. People might start doing things like making micro commits because that gives them a better score. The impacts would probably be subtle, almost imperceptible at first. But over time the differences would accumulate until you found the entire heart of your code had eroded away. Of course, if you were impatient you could probably

Perhaps there is a subtle reference here or something else I'm missing but I'm worried many people will view this comment as sexist. Regardless of how innocent the intent was the implication seems to be that the woman was hired because she is pretty. Sometimes I think we go too far in self censorship and always trying to say the right thing but I believe the large majority of women would find this comment offensive. Of course I can't speak for all women because I'm just an insensitive, dolt of a man who barely understands one of them. However, chances are good that if I found the remark off putting many women would too. The problem is that if a woman sees this comment and concludes it reflects your true beliefs she may decide to not apply for your job offer or choose not to collaborate with you on a project. If Christian's assessment of this woman's abilities is accurate then in this case you would be denying yourself the opportunity to work with the most talented person. As a side note, you appear to have quoted another member but changed the quoted text making it look like they said something they didn't. I'm sure you can empathize with the difficulties many people have using words placed in their mouths by someone else. If you were directly quoting Christian and Christian later changed his original post then my sincere apologies for the accusation.

Well, in defense of the researchers, not that anyone really seems to be attacking them, it is probably not possible to study all of the factors that impact code readability at one time. They selected a modest group of factors that they thought were most pertinent to the questions they were trying to answer. However, I really do like your idea both for its simplicity and testability. My personal hope is that one of two things will happen. One, researchers will realize that the power of the internet isn't the huge pool of test subjects it makes available but the huge number of quality ideas the community can generate. Ideas not just about how to test but what to test. Two, communities like code project will move a little towards doing something more like traditional research rather than just occasional opinion polls. If a decentralized community can come together to create a semi-respected resource like Wikipedia there is no reason a similar thing couldn't happen for research. There really is no reason code project couldn't do its own readability study.

I'm sure they are headed towards publishing a paper about their findings but I believe they will also make the data set public as they did in their first study that only had about 100 participants. Here is a link to their earlier study if you are interested. Raymond P.L. Buse, Westley Weimer: Learning a Metric for Code Readability. IEEE Trans. Software Engineering Vol. 36 No. 4, 546-558, July/Aug 2010[^] If you have the time the paper is only 14 pages long and other than some statistics jargon is pretty approachable. Having a little context for the current study helps answer a lot of questions. Thanks for taking the time to participate.

To my knowledge, the snippets were Java, CUDA, and Python. Overall the survey has around 300 code snippets of which each participant is given a random sample of 20 to rate. I had many different questions about why the test was set up the way it was. I assumed there was some method to the madness. Wes was kind enough to explain some of rationale behind the test design in a forum post at Udacity. I still might have considered doing things differently but after reading his explanations my concerns over the soundness of the approach were relieved. A large reason the test is set up the way it is is because it is duplicating an earlier study that only had around 100 participants. You can read about that study if you like, Raymond P.L. Buse, Westley Weimer: Learning a Metric for Code Readability. IEEE Trans. Software Engineering Vol. 36 No. 4, 546-558, July/Aug 2010[^] There is some statistics jargon in there but it is pretty approachable overall. Part of the thing to realize is that they are using real world code from large or mature open source projects. Not only are they trying to develop some quantifiable measure of readability but they are also trying to determine if measuring readability is actually useful. They do this by looking at the correlation between readability scores and bug counts. They then look to see if changes in readability over time correlate with changes in the number of bugs over time. They are trying to get at the question of whether or not taking the time to make code more readable pays off. There are lots of different things and ways we could go about studying readability and if you read the report you will probably come up with even more ideas than you have now. It is actually kind of surprising how many questions in this area have not even been attempted to be answered. Wes and company are just focusing on one small area and trying to move the ball forward. For better or worse, such is the way with academics.

I'm not officially involved in the survey in any way but I think I can get the debug information into the right hands if you have time to provide some. Any information you are willing to share about the error may be helpful including answers to the following questions. 1. What if any error message are you seeing? 2. What browser are you using? 3. When are you getting the error? Is it when you submit your rating for a code snippet, at the end during the follow up questions, or some other place? 4. Are you always getting the error or is it intermittent? For example, you can never make it past question one because you get an error. Or do you answer a few questions, it errors out, you answer a few more questions, it errors out again. Whether or not you have time to provide debug information I'd like to thank you for your willingness to participate in the survey.

Johnathan Dorn and Wes Weimer, in conjunction with the University of Virginia, are conducting a scientific study on what makes computer code readable. If you have a few minutes they need people to take a short survey on code readability. There are no prizes or up votes for participating, just the chance to possibly make the world a better place. The study is already on track to be the largest of its kind but more help is needed. A copy of their plea with links to the survey is below. Please participate in our research study of program readability.[^] The study takes 15-30 minutes, is anonymous, is approved by our institutional review board (IRB)[^], ... and should help us understand an activity that makes up perhaps 70% of software development. We need datapoints from novices and experts alike! Edit: If you'd like a little background about the test before diving or to know a little more about one of the people behind the effort here is a 6 minute video of Wes talking about the study.[^]