Julia Evans

Programming doesn't belong to men (it belongs to me)

One thing I’ve noticed since I started writing this blog is that I’ll get comments like these on my posts: (all these people are talking about me)

He’s only using the -Ofast gcc option, I wonder what he would get with -march=native -mtune=native which allows the compiler to use more instructions.

But more interestingly, why is he studying the amalgamated C file instead of, you know, the sources?

I think he talks about the actual .db file?

How would each machine/core’s counts know when they are done? If he wants a max of a million counts wouldn’t each machine have to check the counts of each other machine before continuing?

If you change the OP’s problem to summing a vector of floating point numbers, then even the way he has coded it there will still be differences from run to run.

One thing he doesn’t mention is the fear of looking stupid.

When this happens, when people implicitly assume that a Technical Thing On The Internet must be written by a man, I find it confusing. I didn’t grow up with the idea that I was worse at math or programming than the men around me (because, well, I wasn’t!) And I didn’t grow up with the idea that it was weird for me to write programs (why would it be?). And a huge number of the programmers I know and respect are women.

So the idea that programmers are all men or that programming is for men or that an article about the Linux kernel is probably written by a man just seems… silly to me. I feel like the community belongs to me, and like I’m a part of it.

And when people who have more power push marginalized people out of tech, I think, who do you think you are? Why do you think this belongs to you, and that you have the right to say who can come and who can’t?

Programming doesn’t belong to men, or to people who went to MIT, or to white people, or to English-speakers, or to Linux users, or to C programmers, or to people with CS degrees, or to people who are self-taught, or to people who can see, or to people who had easy access to computers when they were young. If you write programs, it belongs to you.

Fear makes you a worse programmer On reading the source code, not the docs