Clean Coder

There is a meme running rampant in our society, and our industry, that we need to confront and resist. It is the unscrupulous meme: The ends justify the means.

This meme is unscrupulous by definition. When a person has scruples it means that they choose honorable means to achieve their ends. A person without scruples will use dishonorable means to achieve their ends. Therefore the notion that the ends justify the means is a notion without scruples, and therefore without honor.

Let us choose a real example in order to illustrate this point. Let us assert that there should be more women programmers. This seems like a worthy goal. After all, the distribution of the sexes in software favors males by 20:1 or so.

What honorable means could we employ to increase the number of women programmers?

Before we can answer that, we ought to try to determine what the cause

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