no mismatch exceptions or debuggin'

August 27, 2009 7:51 AM

Coder Girl -- an ode to all the female programmers out there (youtube)
posted by Afroblanco (80 comments total)

Girl, I want to debug your entire solution; stepping in stepping out and giving you breakpoints in places you never knew you had.
posted by geoff. at 8:08 AM on August 27 [3 favorites]

I enjoyed this, and nodded my head appreciatively every time he ticked off another item from the list of "Things that are computing terms that can also mean sex in a nice way" that he presumably compiled before writing this.
posted by Jofus at 8:11 AM on August 27 [4 favorites]

Well, I mean, who wouldn't like root access from a girl whos source is tight?

Once I work out who to get my grubby mitts on it, this will be going on the hard drive in my car...
posted by twine42 at 8:15 AM on August 27

But is she really a coder? Or does she just play one on youtube?
posted by Obscure Reference at 8:16 AM on August 27 [1 favorite]

I'm on the scene, like a state machine.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:18 AM on August 27 [4 favorites]

And it's only marginally more sexist than the usual "my girl is so hot" song!
posted by DU at 8:27 AM on August 27 [2 favorites]

My girl is so hot that I am considering taking her to consult a physician as I suspect that there is something awry with her ability to maintain homeostasis.
posted by Jofus at 8:29 AM on August 27 [34 favorites]

an ode to all both the female programmers out there

FTFY.
posted by rusty at 8:30 AM on August 27

Ugh... as a so called "coder girl", this was barely a step above "I'll create a GUI interface in Visual Basic, see if I can track an IP address."

goes back to where she belongs on ask.mefi and reddit
posted by cgg at 8:34 AM on August 27 [1 favorite]

Wanna get in where I fit in like a plugin!

Sigh. Already sent to my sweet coder girl. Thanks, Afroblanco. :]
posted by fiercecupcake at 8:35 AM on August 27

an ode to all both the female programmers out there

CUZ THEIR AREN"T ANY GIRLS WHO PROGRAM!?

HARHAR
posted by chunking express at 8:36 AM on August 27 [1 favorite]

HAR! Yes, that was the gist of my joke. Well divined, friendo.
posted by rusty at 8:41 AM on August 27

There ARE coder girls out there, in fact this was sent to me by one. God, I wish there were more. I truly do.
posted by Afroblanco at 8:43 AM on August 27

When I started working at my current location, I was surprised by how many female scientists, engineers and programmers there were. There are more than you think, the reason you think there are fewer is:

1) There ARE fewer, but not as much fewer as stereotyped
2) They are less chest-beating about it (both online and off)
posted by DU at 8:45 AM on August 27

3) They are totally hiding from you, dude
posted by kittens for breakfast at 8:47 AM on August 27 [6 favorites]

Afroblanco (et al): Me too.
posted by rusty at 8:51 AM on August 27

I'm a coder girl! My bf had sent this to me.

Sooo romantic.
posted by zonkers at 8:52 AM on August 27

They are less chest-beating about it (both online and off)

Keeping it on the .dll
posted by Artw at 8:53 AM on August 27 [23 favorites]

Boy, she could implement my interface anytime. As long as I didn't get a compile-time error. And then check it in anyway and break the build, and then go to lunch and hope someone else fixed it. If you know what I mean.

Am I right, guys?
posted by drjimmy11 at 8:56 AM on August 27 [4 favorites]

Yeah, Buddy!

I really dug the text message.
posted by solipsophistocracy at 9:04 AM on August 27

That video is totally dope and speaks to my demographic. I would give that nice young man access to all of my private members.
posted by kscottz at 9:16 AM on August 27 [1 favorite]

Why are all of these female coder rap videos about sex? All I want from a man is to set up a nice source repository in the country and to develop new child classes that inherit from multiple parent classes.
posted by kscottz at 9:25 AM on August 27 [4 favorites]

10 PRINT "You're unlike a summer's day."
20 PRINT "You're more lovely and less hot."
30 PRINT "March's Lion threatens May."
40 PRINT "Summer's shorter than I thought."
A: 50 GOTO 20
60 DIM
70 SWAP Fair for Fair_declined
80 END IF The Changing Course Untrimm'd
90 PRESET (My Love) [Eternal Shine]
END IF (Men Cease to Breathe) OR (Eyes to See)
100 IF A's True GET #Life, to_Thee
posted by The White Hat at 9:28 AM on August 27 [1 favorite]

I would give that nice young man access to all of my private members.

In other words, you like him as more than just a friend class?
posted by Afroblanco at 9:29 AM on August 27

I feel objectified.
posted by needled at 9:33 AM on August 27 [1 favorite]

oooh ooh i can play...

when i see her my pointer gets put into a new position
she put my heart into a race condition
posted by empath at 9:42 AM on August 27

We all know this is going to devolve into programming-related puns and innuendo.

fuck yes
posted by shadytrees at 9:42 AM on August 27

In other words, you like him as more than just a friend class?

Afroblanco, I would to have him pay me a visit and maybe show him my "big O" notation.
posted by kscottz at 9:51 AM on August 27 [2 favorites]

Yo mamma's got public accessor functions exposing her private members.
posted by idiopath at 9:54 AM on August 27 [2 favorites]

SO AWKWARD.

I shudder to imagine his ode to all the female chemical engineers out there or female plumbers.
posted by GuyZero at 10:11 AM on August 27

Girl, I want to debug your entire solution; stepping in stepping out and giving you breakpoints in places you never knew you had.

Without these coder girls, you wouldn't have breakpoints to give.
posted by hoppytoad at 10:13 AM on August 27 [1 favorite]

We all know this is going to devolve into programming-related puns and innuendo.

Sorry, but I don't think anyone can beat Monzy, with So Much Drama in the PhD and The Pimping Lemma.

[NOT SEXIST, because I'm a CS chick myself]
posted by specialagentwebb at 10:13 AM on August 27 [1 favorite]

Above links probably NSFW text. Sorry about that.
posted by specialagentwebb at 10:13 AM on August 27

I just don't find this very amusing at all. Women coders are as rare as white elephants. Or did I mean pretty women coders are as rare as white elephants.

Also, if you are a programmer geek, the last thing you want is to dream about meeting a geeky girl programmer. It's just wrong.
posted by flexiverse at 10:14 AM on August 27

Without these coder girls, you wouldn't have breakpoints to give.

Very true. There was actually a really great post about them a while back.
posted by Afroblanco at 10:16 AM on August 27 [1 favorite]

...just make sure you do a clean install of LaTeX first!
posted by markkraft at 10:17 AM on August 27

How did I know coder girl would be using a Mac? Sigh.
posted by jeffamaphone at 10:37 AM on August 27

> Sorry, but I don't think anyone can beat Monzy, with So Much Drama in the PhD and The Pimping Lemma.

haha, i love those rhymes!

Although So Much Drama in the PhD gave me a brief panicky flashback to my grad school days programming fuzzy logic in C with malloc all over the place for huge-ass matrix computations ... former CS chick here
posted by needled at 10:41 AM on August 27

There ARE coder girls out there, in fact this was sent to me by one. God, I wish there were more. I truly do.

I think there will be a higher percentage of female coders as time goes by, considering that computers in general are more mainstream and diverse than they were back when this generation of coders grew up. It wasn't that long ago that the only people who had a chance to get their feet wet in programming were those that self-selected themselves into the highly nerdy, techy, mostly male subculture that dominated early personal computers. These days activities like writing javascript for a website, writing Action Script for a Flash app, or writing Objective-C for an iPhone app are all relatively mainstream and accessible activities, as opposed to the bad old days of learning by typing in BASIC code that you found in some obscure magazine into your TRS-80 computer. I don't think there's anything inherently gendered about programming, so the demographics are bound to expand as more different kinds of people grow up being exposed to computers and programming.
posted by burnmp3s at 10:42 AM on August 27

jeffamaphone: "How did I know coder girl would be using a Mac? Sigh."

Yeah this is I think the one flaw in the video. 95% of all the coders I know use wintel machines, because lets face it there is a bigger market coding for them.
posted by MrBobaFett at 10:55 AM on August 27

I thought this was going to be to the tune of punk rock girl.

I don't know what to say.

I don't know what to think.
posted by boo_radley at 10:59 AM on August 27 [1 favorite]

You know whats awesome?

When people (regardless of sex), either purposely or without thought turn a professional female anything into "girl".

She can't be a Coder who is also a woman...nope, she's "Coder Girl". Her friends are Doctor Girl, Lawyer Girl, and Architect Girl. They have awesome powers...but not as much power as Coder, Doctor, Lawyer, and Architect!

Awesome.

You've come a long way, BABY!

This did as much for women as Girls Gone Wild did for the Women's Movement!
Chalk another one up for human rights!

WOOOOOOOOO!!!
posted by hal_c_on at 10:59 AM on August 27 [1 favorite]

This reminds me of hanging out with the geeky guys on IRC back in the day, when all I wanted to do was talk about computers and code, and all they wanted to do was make thinly veiled references to getting in my pants. Ah, memories.
posted by geeky at 11:05 AM on August 27

This did as much for women as Girls Gone Wild did for the Women's Movement!

Thoughts:
1. Maybe he called it "Coder Girl" because he doesn't want to sing a song about "Coders" as a whole?
2. Maybe he used the word "girl" because "woman" or "lady" or "female" or "non-gender-specific person" all have too many syllables?
3. Maybe he calls her "girl" because she's still college-age, and might take offense at being called "woman", because she identifies "woman" as meaning an older female?
4. Maybe wtf, can't you find something more offensive to get offended at? I'm a young professional female who codes for a living. I'm a coder girl. OH NO DEROGATORY!

Side note: If I was writing a song about female lawyers, I'd probably go with "Lawyer Ladies", but that's just me.
posted by specialagentwebb at 11:08 AM on August 27 [3 favorites]

this song made me cringe.
posted by fuzzypantalones at 11:18 AM on August 27 [1 favorite]

I thought this was going to be to the tune of punk rock girl.

I was hoping for Coma Girl, myself.
posted by Strange Interlude at 11:33 AM on August 27

Anyone notice that the first and third verses are the same? So what, the writer got half-way through the song, ran out of ideas and used a GOSUB to fill out the rest of the track?

/I haven't done programming since my BASIC class in Grade Ten; otherwise my joke would have been up to date. No Coder Girls in my future, I guess...
posted by spoobnooble at 11:55 AM on August 27 [1 favorite]

Also, if you are a programmer geek, the last thing you want is to dream about meeting a geeky girl programmer. It's just wrong.

I don't know, I've met plenty of female programmers.
posted by delmoi at 11:56 AM on August 27

Is this line numbers week? Is it some 80s retro fashion thing?
posted by Artw at 12:02 PM on August 27 [1 favorite]

It's no nerd girl, but I'll take what I can get.
posted by jessamyn at 12:16 PM on August 27 [1 favorite]

I think there will be a higher percentage of female coders as time goes by, considering that computers in general are more mainstream and diverse than they were back when this generation of coders grew up. It wasn't that long ago that the only people who had a chance to get their feet wet in programming were those that self-selected themselves into the highly nerdy, techy, mostly male subculture that dominated early personal computers.

*cough* mainframes *cough*

JCL, COBOL, PL/1... even in the early 1980's there were quite a few female programmers out there. (For a while I was the only woman working among about 80 male colleagues for a IT consultancy firm, though.)
posted by rjs at 12:29 PM on August 27

I think there will be a higher percentage of female coders as time goes by, considering that computers in general are more mainstream and diverse than they were back when this generation of coders grew up

Actually the percentage of women graduating with CS degrees has dropped pretty dramatically in the last twenty years from 36.4% down to 22%.
posted by octothorpe at 12:36 PM on August 27

95% of all the coders I know use wintel machines...

Really? I just did a quick count of the ten programmers I know best, and I got six fingers of Linux, three fingers of Mac (Unix), and only one finger of Windows.

(Add your own easy punch line.)
posted by rokusan at 12:54 PM on August 27

Maybe a slight derail, but one of my first coding mentors was an older Texan woman who had started with C programming on DEC machines (PDP-11s baby), and moved on to web apps later on when that became the big thing. She taught me a lot about general programming strategies, things I still do and think about to this day--and introduced me to basic UNIX commands and shell scripting as well. This was back in the days when Perl was what you used to create dynamic (ha! How that term has changed in its meaning...) web apps. Actually, we even had some bash scripts doing web duty and--I kid you not--compiled C CGI programs. But I digress.

Anyways, just wanted to mention that since we are talking about women programmers. She was awesome (I'm leaving her name out on purpose, btw, not because I've forgotten).
posted by dubitable at 12:56 PM on August 27 [1 favorite]

To second rokusan, most of the people I know who program own Macs now. A few use Linux boxes.

There were 20 people in my Compilers class at the University of Waterloo, which is one of the more bad ass computer science class they offered. I took the class 5 years ago. In that class I counted 16 people on ibooks/powerbooks. I imagine this number has only increased with time. Macs are more popular now.
posted by chunking express at 1:02 PM on August 27

No wait, I have it backwards, 4 of the dudes were on Macs. (16 seemed way too high, since not many people brought laptops to class in the first place. I need to learn to read.)
posted by chunking express at 1:07 PM on August 27

*cough* mainframes *cough*

JCL, COBOL, PL/1... even in the early 1980's there were quite a few female programmers out there.

...

Actually the percentage of women graduating with CS degrees has dropped pretty dramatically in the last twenty years from 36.4% down to 22%.

Yeah, when I said that this generation of programmers was less diverse due to the subculture around early personal computers, I meant specifically the people who grew up being exposed to computers in the 80s or early 90s and went on to a career in programming. I would say that the statistics that 1985 saw higher rates of women in CS than 2005 would back that up, because before the early 80s, most programmers were exposed to computers in an academic setting, which although not completely gender neutral was significantly less male-slanted than the early personal computer subculture.

I think it's less about computers being well-known now and accessible to more women, and more that there is less of a gap between the number of women who have access to computers and programming languages now than there was in the period between around 1980-1999. The statistics could end up proving me wrong eventually, but I think the increased parity between computer using females versus males these days will have to lead to at least a smaller gap between female and male programmers.
posted by burnmp3s at 1:18 PM on August 27

Shout out to the Vaxen!
posted by Artw at 1:20 PM on August 27

The whole mac-in-CS thing is probably because it has a standard UNIX shell which is a bazillion times less irritating to deal with, even versus cygwin and other Windows workarounds. But even most CS students aren't hardcore enough to wrestle Linux onto a laptop.
posted by GuyZero at 1:28 PM on August 27 [1 favorite]

Or mefi just skews mac enthusiast with broad definition of coding.
posted by Artw at 1:49 PM on August 27

I don't doubt that women coders are more common than the stereotypes suggest, but I can honestly say that I know as many transgender (M->F) coders as I do coders with XX inside...

We geeks are a strange lot...
posted by twine42 at 2:01 PM on August 27

Thanks for that link, Afroblanco. Looks like the ENIAC programmers project is still trying raise money for the documentary.

For a while I was the only woman working among about 80 male colleagues for a IT consultancy firm, though.

I suppose this is an edge case, so I'm curious what your average experience has been like. In the 20 odd years I've been working, the percentage of women programmers has remained pretty consistent around 20-25%.
posted by hoppytoad at 2:10 PM on August 27

Or mefi just skews mac enthusiast with broad definition of coding.
posted by Artw at 5:49 PM on August 27 [+] [!]


Corporate programmers are still mostly PC-centric, but for those types anything outside of their immediate job description is beyond their interest. At my previous job I worked with a guy who was a wizard of a web programmer with J2EE who literally didn't know what PHP was, let alone Ruby or Python.

But the type of developers who do it for fun or who work in smaller companies doing web stuff which isn't platform dependent, or who are indie developers, are all on Macs these days. And yeah, those are the ones more likely to make songs about coder girls or talk about programming online.
posted by Space Coyote at 2:18 PM on August 27

I suppose this is an edge case, so I'm curious what your average experience has been like. In the 20 odd years I've been working, the percentage of women programmers has remained pretty consistent around 20-25%.

In my experience of a dozen years, it's been 10 - 15 percent. Right now, the company I work for has exactly zero women out of about 20 developers, QA testers and technical support folks.
posted by octothorpe at 2:51 PM on August 27

$my_girl = 'red hot';
$your_girl != 'diddly squat';
$my_girl > $your_girl;
posted by kirkaracha at 2:59 PM on August 27 [2 favorites]

In my experience of a dozen years, it's been 10 - 15 percent. Right now, the company I work for has exactly zero women out of about 20 developers, QA testers and technical support folks.

In BIG_CORPORATION, the QA engineering department was about 40% women. On the team I was on, half the programmers were women (40s-50s). At the startup I'm working with now the dev team is 1/3rd women, but there are only three devs, so I'm not sure how good of a metric that is. Going back to the dotcom daze, the team of 17 I was in charge of had 4 female programmers. At another BIG_CORPORATION one out the four developers on the team was female.

I had never really thought about it before, but I would guess somewhere around 25% of the developers I've worked with have been female over the last 12 years.
posted by ryoshu at 3:38 PM on August 27

She can't be a Coder who is also a woman...nope, she's "Coder Girl".

Because if she'd been a codin' woman, this would be a blues song about how she done left him when his hard drive crashed.

I do not know why it should be so, but it is.
posted by Pallas Athena at 3:44 PM on August 27 [6 favorites]

Codin' woman...got me down
Codin' woman...got me down
My MacBook stop workin', lawd you know...she can't be foun'
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:06 PM on August 27 [2 favorites]

$my_girl = 'red hot';
$your_girl != 'diddly squat';
$my_girl > $your_girl;

push(@my_girl, $your_girl);
$your_girl = null;
posted by 0xdeadc0de at 5:48 PM on August 27 [3 favorites]

Better than I expected, especially after all the hurf durf only two ugly girls in the world write code comments upstream. I like how she is dressed exactly as I did through most of high school/college (baggy tshirt over jeans), it sells me that she might actually be a programmer not just some pretty girl he asked to sit and type on a computer while he made the video. (note: I now am a programmer woman in girly skirts, but I didn't have the ovaries to pull that shit off in college)
Seriously though, if your company of 20 has no women, or you have only known 2 women programmers ever, I would posit that in fact there might be a problem with the recruiting/hiring process at the place that you work.
posted by ch1x0r at 5:58 PM on August 27

Or mefi just skews mac enthusiast with broad definition of coding.

The dudes in my compilers class were writing an Ada compiler. Probably in C++, though I think some groups were writing the compilers in Java and at least one group was using LISP. I know people who do Ruby on Rails stuff who use macs. People doing PHP. People doing Python coding. I write C++ code for a living and switched away from PCs when Windows 95 came out, retiring my 486. I think people seriously interested in computers aren't using Windows boxes anymore.
posted by chunking express at 6:48 PM on August 27

Seriously though, if your company of 20 has no women, or you have only known 2 women programmers ever, I would posit that in fact there might be a problem with the recruiting/hiring process at the place that you work.

Probably, we're small enough that we don't even have an HR person so hiring is not very formal. We do have women in marketing, sales, and the office manager is a woman but, there are just very few woman candidates for software engineering jobs. A friend of mine is a recruiter for the local site of [giant software company] with a very progressive HR department and she very actively tries to recruit women but they still only manage to have about 10% women. If the schools are only graduating such a small percentage of women engineers, then there is only going to be a tiny pool of applicants. I certainly don't think that's a good thing but I'm not sure what to do about it.
posted by octothorpe at 8:03 PM on August 27 [1 favorite]

I think people seriously interested in computers aren't using Windows boxes anymore.

I think that's true to a certain extent, but for web design and development at least I feel like the move has been less an emphasis on Mac or *nix personal computers and more a move to platform-agnostic online applications. Sure, you ssh into, uh, something with a command prompt sometimes, but if you're dealing with CSS/HTML/PHP/Javascript/whatever on some server that may or may not occupy a single physical location god-knows-where, does it really matter what your laptop is running? On the other hand, most designers and coders I know have Macs (though I like my Windows machine just fine).
posted by OverlappingElvis at 11:54 PM on August 27

Big-endian girls you make the rockin' world go round.
posted by Sparx at 1:43 PM on August 28

As a female developer, I had no qualms about the term "coder girl". "Woman" or "lady" would have seemed a little off, anyway. He's talking about a young, single female. I don't get the fuss.

However, codergirl still wins in my book.
posted by june made him a gemini at 1:56 PM on August 28 [1 favorite]

I think people seriously interested in computers aren't using Windows boxes anymore.

C'mon, dude. This isn't the place for that.
posted by Afroblanco at 2:19 PM on August 28

No, seriously. "Serious computer people" very often (though not 100%) use some UNIX system for a variety of very valid reasons and there are more affordable UNIX variants now than ever. Windows is what it is, but if you need to write code a UNIX box is a lot of people's choice.

Certainly you can do whatever you like on Windows for the most part but don't get your back up about rehashing old flamewars because this ain't it.

I remember that back in the days when Windows 95 came out Waterloo was turning out CS grads who didn't know how to use Windows. I thought it was kind of weird but back then not everyone owned their own PC, even in the CS dept. I had the somewhat rare luxury of getting a job doing Windows software dev early on. oooohhh the thrill of my first 800x600 SVGA display.
posted by GuyZero at 2:29 PM on August 28

chunking express : I think people seriously interested in computers aren't using Windows boxes anymore.

GuyZero : don't get your back up about rehashing old flamewars because this ain't it.

Seriously dude, this isn't the place for it.
posted by Afroblanco at 3:36 PM on August 28 [1 favorite]

"Not to add more fuel to the fire.... but to add more fuel to the fire, did I tell you about how right I am?"
posted by Afroblanco at 3:38 PM on August 28

I loved this!

I was going to say "I know a lot of women programmers" and I do - but I know a surprising number who used to be programmers but have migrated to other roles: head of product marketing, evangelist, project manager, specification guru, etc. I suspect the skills at the margins of gender difference have a lot to do with this.
posted by DarlingBri at 7:25 PM on August 28