[natasham25]

Hi, a woman programmer here. I asked a question on StackOverflow once while first learning Python, and got a pretty mean answer. I called the guy out on my blog, of course: http://natashatherobot.com/hey-dude-you-dont-have-to-be-mean....

Before asking the question, I never posted on StackOverflow before, because I expected a mean answer, and that's exactly what happened. StackOverflow is not a very safe place for asking questions. It's a place where guys go to show off how much smarter they are than you. Most of StackOverflow questions start with "I'm a noob at this..." - that's because people, even guys, feel the need to pre-qualify the question by proving that they're not complete idiots despite not knowing the answer.

Asking a question is a vulnerable thing. You are admitting in public that you don't know something. It's really hard to participate when you know the very same public you're trying to get help from will turn around and critique you.

[clicks]

The supposed mean part of the answer:

    Learn to write Python code properly according to the style guide – PEP-8 filter highlights only bad code and in your case the whole file is badly written.

I am a male. This does not strike me as mean. I'm thinking now though... are you maybe just an emotionally sensitive person? The response is maybe bluntly put, but it is probably sincere and hastily said. Which makes it easier to construe it non-personally -- it's just a guy on the Internet who said it, he probably doesn't even know your gender. And you know what -- as weird as it may sound, I wish I had received this kind of criticism when I was younger. Too often I was showered with positive comments that I became afraid of non-positive criticism to the point that I stopped taking risks that would endanger my reputation or feelings. It took me some time to learn to just take all criticism and make the best of it: detach the person-element, and just take from it what is truly useful to me, but I'm glad I did.

Edit: I'm thinking 'are you maybe just an emotionally sensitive person' may have come off as offensive? Sorry if it did, I'm not sure how else to phrase it, you probably know what I mean here.

[gizmo686]

>Edit: I'm thinking 'are you maybe just an emotionally sensitive person' may have come off as offensive? Sorry if it did, I'm not sure how else to phrase it, you probably know what I mean here.

I think it is more to do with familiarity of the culture of compute Q/A sites. My dad recently was looking around the internet for a solution to his computers overheating problem . He remarked to me about how rude everyone on the internet forums he looked at was (he did not post, just read existing threads). As someone who has used this type of site for a long time, I look at the answers and see valuable information relevant to the question asked. But, I can see how someone not familiar with the culture would find it rude or offensive.

Looking at this case in particular, the question was "Every time I save my code in Sublime Text 2, all of the lines end up highlighted as seen below. It's pretty annoying, and I would love to disable it, but I'm not sure what triggered it in the first place or what to Google. Any ideas?"

And the full response was: "The cause is SublimeLinter plug-in and its PEP-8 filter

https://github.com/SublimeLinter/SublimeLinter

Your code does not conform PEP-8 style guide:

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/

Learn to write Python code properly according to the style guide – PEP-8 filter highlights only bad code and in your case the whole file is badly written."

Looking at it as someone fammilar with the culture, I see: A statement of the cause. Links to the technical resources relevent to the problem.

The 'mean' part of the answer starts "Learn to write Python code properly according to the style guide", Which I read as advice saying, you should learn to write Python code following the style guide (which is both good advice (in my opinion), and directly relevent to the problem being discussed).

The rest of the answer reads: "PEP-8 filter highlights only bad code and in your case the whole file is badly written." I read this answer as a concise description of the problem ' PEP-8 highlights bad code, and your whole file is bad by its standards [because it does not conform to the style guide]'

Again, this is all coming from the perspective of someone familiar with the culture. The problem isn't so much that SO (and simmilar sites) is unwelcoming to women, than it is that they are unwelcoming to new people. The problem is that we want consise answers, and writing consise, non-offensive answers is difficult and time consuming. So, as a culture, we evolved to view such answers as non-offensive.

EDIT: as an aside, the original answer has since be edited to be less offensive, and offer more explanation as to why learning PEP-8 style is a good idea. Personally, I would prefer getting the original answer as it is easier to read and parse out the important info.

[MetaCosm]

Couple points. First of all, you being a women in this case seems completely irrelevant to both your question and the people who responded to you on SO. Was the injection of gender supposed to give us context for your response, or imply that you were responded to differently because of it?

Secondly, I guess we can disagree with what "mean" is. As you yourself pointed out, his response was super helpful to you -- and he isn't even paid to do it, just a friendly internet volunteer, helping you with your problem and linking you to more resources. As for what you called "mean" ... lets deconstruct that a bit...

"Learn to write Python code properly according to the style guide" -- not mean, a short and to the point recommendation, abrasive at worst.

"PEP-8 filter highlights only bad code" -- obviously as PEP-8 is a style guide, he means 'badly styled code', he could have made it more clear, but I think the context is obvious.

"and in your case the whole file is badly written." -- this is important, it explains why there is markup on every line, and again PEP-8 is a style guide, so he is saying your entire file is badly formatted by PEP-8 standards. Again, nothing hurtful in there.

I can see how the words "bad code" might be an emotional trigger, but in context, it makes perfect sense and since you didn't show any real code, just some boilerplate Poll/Choose -- I can't even fathom what there was to be defensive about, or hurt by.

[minikomi]

Hmm. That comment is brash, and perhaps intimidating to a beginner, but I wouldn't call it mean. "It makes my eyes bleed" or "it looks like an idiot wrote it" vs "badly written" (it also seems like a communication problem - his answer was badly written you might say).

[belorn]

brash and intimidating communities is clearly a factor when factoring in how user friendly something is, and how easy it is to join a community. What one might not think of however, is how that effect gender equality for a community.

That for me is a interesting insight to draw (through studies would be nice to confirm it).