Natural Born Developers
Modern software development, at least for quite a few, is all about being agile. Being agile often means that you must be able to change your code at any given time for a number of reasons; fixing bugs, achieving a better API, achieving better readability and a whole bunch of other good reasons. In order to achieve this, we try to make our code as refactorable (is this a valid word? :)) as possible. Meaning that the code is easy to change.
In addition to this, more and more developers are trying to accomplish their work through the utilization of existing patterns, or taking known patterns and modify them, or maybe even create their own patterns.
At this point, you’re probably wondering; where am I going with this? Well. Its becoming more and more obvious to me; Women are the natural born developers. They have, for instance, refactoring built into their genetics. From a very early age they will try to take some that is already there and try to improve it. Often they start with themselves, trying on different clothes to make themselves look better. At a certain point they add makeup to the mix. Refactoring themselves to a better self, for improving their interface. They continue this refactoring and when a boyfriend is introduced into their life, they start refactoring him as well. Starting again with the subtle smaller things; the clothes, moving on to haircut and adding or removing facial hairs. In addition to this, they bring the refactoring into their homes and offices in the form of redecorating or refurnishing.
When it comes to patterns, they are all into patterns. Its called fashion. They look around their surroundings and study other women from catalogues, comercials, bilboards and what not, and figure out what patterns are hip at the given time and stribe to blend into the pattern jungle.
Why is it then that computer programming is still a male dominated occupation? And are we, in the lack of women as work-mates, stribing to become women? I mean, have we been so lonely all these years that we are mimicking the womens refactoring abilities and their taste for patterns/fashion?
I will leave these questions open, as I really don’t know the answers myself. :)