Are most programmers male?

[brueckd at tbye.com]

On Mon, 12 Aug 2002, Frithiof Andreas Jensen wrote:

> >You need the hermit engineer to actually
> > build the core product or service.
> 
> Like the plague, you do ;-)
> 
> Ever tried debugging (the heresy of it!) or to document & test said
> hermits code?
> 
> The objective of software development is not merely to produce code, it is
> to solve problems. The users problems, not the organisations - having to
> mediate for someone with the combined social skills of a decaying moose
> carcasse and an alligator on speed will make life harder than it needs to
> be!

Yup. The code itself is worth _something_, but the real asset is the 
knowledge that was used/acquired when creating the code, and that 
knowledge is terribly hard to extract from the hermit. This is the same 
reason why code is easier to write than it is to read, and why programmers 
(myself included) are always tempted to throw old code away and write a 
better version instead of endlessly tweaking the old stuff.

-Dave