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Re:Programmers Need To Learn Statistics or I Will Kill Them ... by mynameishere on Wednesday August 29, 2007 @10:54PM (#48088)
I think women are better programmers because they have less ego and are typically more interested in the gear rather than the pissing contest

Here's a statistic: 99 percent of all achievements in computer science come from men. But, hey, I'm no statistician, so maybe I'll just trust some off-the-cuff twaddle from random jerks.

I try to show them how to properly graph a run chart and they're indignant.

Just wondering: Is this guy hacking device drivers? OpenGl? Maybe he's tweaking the last bit of sweat out of microsoft's C++ compiler? No...he's clearly doing CRUD work. Performance issues in CRUD work are solved by RAM and memcached, not screwing around in Excel. That's why your co-workers are indignant: You don't understand your trade.

If we want to only verify one single query on a database then what's stopping us? Stupidity that's what.

Because there are 6000 queries, and not all of us can spend all-day-all-night screwing around with Excel.

The classic example of this is the Pet Store

"The Pet Store" isn't the classic example of jack.

Then I hit the DB2 database and about crapped my pants. Almost all of the queries performed great, except one query that had sub-second response on average, but a 60 second standard deviation!

...my own statistics are a little rusty. If the average is .5, and the SD is 60, doesn't that mean that certain runs should be choking so hard that the log file would...just freeze. I mean, break out the Excel if you want, but I've seen log files choke before, and it's usually obvious what the problem is: The entry at the bottom.

"It's not the database, it's IBM's DB2 configuration.

LOL. DB2's configuration being a part of...what then?

The next day we had IBM fixing the problem (turned out to be a single update index command) and we all kept our jobs.

Our hero! (Self-proclaimed)

That's what a proper analysis method can do for you.

Or just watching the log file.

Re:Programmers Need To Learn Statistics or I Will Kill Them ... by tx on Thursday August 30, 2007 @02:13AM (#48152)
Is this guy hacking device drivers? OpenGl? Maybe he's tweaking the last bit of sweat out of microsoft's C++ compiler? No...he's clearly doing CRUD work

This guy wrote Mongrel, which is a very solid HTTP server - the most common way to deploy Ruby applications these days. Also he was one of the guys on ruby-lang who discovered nasty bugs in Ruby's threading implementation (everybody else just preferred bitching about "unreliable" Ruby threads and memory leaks)

Re:Programmers Need To Learn Statistics or I Will Kill Them ... by mynameishere on Thursday August 30, 2007 @02:33AM (#48157)
Great. An a-hole with credentials.

Still, he's clearly doing CRUD work in the provided example. It's not my fault that he wasn't on the list, but to show I'm a good sport I added him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programmers#S

Re:Programmers Need To Learn Statistics or I Will Kill Them ... by jamesbritt on Friday August 31, 2007 @02:53AM (#48614)
> the most common way to deploy Ruby applications these days

Say what? Are you sure you aren't conflating Ruby with Rails?

Re:Programmers Need To Learn Statistics or I Will Kill Them ... by tx on Friday August 31, 2007 @02:32PM (#48842)
No I am not. You can use mongrel with any framework you want.
Re:Programmers Need To Learn Statistics or I Will Kill Them ... by jamesbritt on Monday September 03, 2007 @03:38PM (#49751)
Framework?

Not every Ruby app is a Web app. I've written dozens of Ruby apps, but only some of them run on the Web.

Re:Programmers Need To Learn Statistics or I Will Kill Them ... by jamiequint on Wednesday August 29, 2007 @11:11PM (#48095)
> Here's a statistic: 99 percent of all achievements in computer science come from men.

Ummm....wouldn't that be because ~99% of all coders are men?

Re:Programmers Need To Learn Statistics or I Will Kill Them ... by mynameishere on Thursday August 30, 2007 @01:22AM (#48134)
Ummm...no

raw numbers

http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:_0JxL7T75-sJ:www.bls.go...

versus prominent programmers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programmers

I would suggest if you strip off some of the dubious or ceremonial entries ("ada") the picture gets worse still.

Re:Programmers Need To Learn Statistics or I Will Kill Them ... by jamiequint on Thursday August 30, 2007 @02:29AM (#48156)
Computer Programmers .... 3.9%

I count 9 women out of about 230 which comes out to...

3.91%

What is the point you are trying to make anyway? Are you going to go on to tell me black people suck at programming to because they don't compose 25% of that list (but do compose 25% of graduates in CS from the stats you linked)?

Get over yourself.

Re:Programmers Need To Learn Statistics or I Will Kill Them ... by mynameishere on Thursday August 30, 2007 @02:35AM (#48158)
Women comprise 25.3 percent, not 3.9 percent.
Re:Programmers Need To Learn Statistics or I Will Kill Them ... by jamiequint on Thursday August 30, 2007 @03:55AM (#48166)
fair enough, I misread the chart, but my last statement still stands (with numbers swapped 3.9% black, 25% female). Your point?
Re:Programmers Need To Learn Statistics or I Will Kill Them ... by bvttf on Thursday August 30, 2007 @07:49AM (#48187)
His point was that female programmers aren't superior to male ones. Remember he quoted "women are better programmers because they have less ego". Which is a huge load on both counts.
Re:Programmers Need To Learn Statistics or I Will Kill Them ... by Tichy on Thursday August 30, 2007 @07:58AM (#48190)
Replying to that by "no, men are better programmers than women" doesn't seem the way to go. Especially in response to a rant about faulty statistics skills. That argument with 99% whatever certainly was extremely faulty (I can't even begin to describe how faulty, it is just waaaaaaay off). It just goes to show that some carefulness with statistics would be a good idea. Anyway, that response basically proved the point of the article.