Do Women Write Better Code?

We all know men hate to ask for directions. Apparently they loathe putting directions in computer code, too. Emma McGrattan, the senior vice-president of engineering for computer-database company Ingres-and one of Silicon Valley’s highest-ranking female programmers-insists that men and women write code differently. Women are more considerate of those who will use the code later. They’ll intersperse their code-those strings of instructions that result in nifty applications and programs-with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the lines the way they did and exactly how they did it. Men, on the other hand, have no such pretenses. Often, they try to obfuscate things in the code