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This is classic Black and White engineering advice, which shuns pragmatism because some idiot could come along and make a mess of the codebase. If someone is ca
by krona 10y ago
This is classic Black and White engineering advice, which shuns pragmatism because some idiot could come along and make a mess of the codebase. If someone is capable of displaying such bad judgement for such a trivial matter then they shouldn't be working on the code in the first place.
Take the Tensorflow codebase (and Google and Microsoft code, and linux in general). There are currently ~1,028 TODO's in Tensorflow, most of which refer to a particular engineer in the form TODO(<name>):<comment>. This is pragmatism and good judgement in action.
Software engineering is all kinds of shades of grey, competing considerations, trade-offs and balances. It's what makes it interesting.
- Johnie 10y agoAt Google, the team that I worked on required the format `// TODO(name): [Tracking Bug#] comment ` In other places, I've seen just blanket `// TODO: comment` is pretty bad. There's no accountability and also you don't know when it's obsolete.
- hinkley 10y agoSometimes the TODO message doesn't make enough sense, and having the author gives you who to ask for context.
- koverstreet 10y agoThat's what git blame is for (I've got a thing in vim that runs git blame on the current line, and pops up the commit message in the quickfix window).
- hinkley 10y agoGit blame only works until code starts shifting around.