SYWBAP

I briefly followed the spat between people and other people about the ratio of female / male at ‘Web 2.0’ conferences. One of the most linked images is this one and it’s quite telling, yes.

Having been professionally programming for quite some years now, back in the Old Country I’ve seen plenty of female programmers: most of them well-educated and quite a few returning to previous positions as technical leads to fix up Y2K issues (COBOL). I also remember a female VMS admin who typed faster than me and did some amazing things at the commandline. At that time, she was one of those professionals who just like me loved computers¹.

Last night I was working on a copy of the xsamplex template PHP code: While browsing through some of the pre-baked templates (and styles) I discovered that many of these younger programmers don’t even consider breaking lines at column 80. So, imagine the frustration loading these files into vi in a terminal session. The other annoyance is that everybody and their uncle doesn’t seem to be aware of the different way Unix machines handle linefeeds, which makes me think that every PHP programmer solely programs under Windows. This kind of contradicts the target platform they’re after, which is generally the Unix platform.

¹ This is also were I learned to appreciate VMS Unix machines (way years ago, HP opened up the sources for VMS)