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Why do people feel the need to standardize these things? Emoji used occasionally are fun and refreshing and can draw attention to important commits. Emoji used

Why do people feel the need to standardize these things? Emoji used occasionally are fun and refreshing and can draw attention to important commits. Emoji used by default become line noise. To paraphrase Goodhart’s Law, when a joke becomes a standard it ceases to be fun. I also object to the details of the categorization. Some tags split up tasks that really should be done together (eg fixing bugs and updating tests, or adding features and writing docs) and some tags are duplicates (eg :art: and :recycle:).

bluntfang 7y ago
>Why do people feel the need to standardize these things? Really? Because standardization leads to automation.
- iainmerrick 7y ago
  I'm not against automation in principle, but in this case you don't actually need to standardize before you automate. Observation: people are prefixing their commit messages with emoji! Automation: let's group commit messages by emoji, with an "uncategorised" bucket for emoji-less commits. Job done, that's all you need. The "standard" that defines which emoji to use and when can evolve completely separately. I'd argue that this standardization is actively bad, as it adds to the learning curve when contributing to a project, stifles creativity (you may only use these emoji in exactly these ways) and wastes time by encouraging bikeshedding (people adding new categories, or arguing over existing categories).
  - bluntfang 7y ago
    It only adds to the learning curve because some people are adamantly against it, causing unneeded stress for adopting the standard.
    - iainmerrick 7y ago
      No, it adds to the learning curve because it adds new rules. I also happen to think they are bad rules in this case, but that’s a separate matter.
MisterTea 7y ago
> Why do people feel the need to standardize these things? I'm of the opinion that these kinds of silly arguments seem to be made by people who like hearing themselves talk. They want their name on something. They want to feel like they were a part of something. It's all ego. The rest of us are happy with pragmatism and archaic things like text, which is made of glyphs which form words which we speak.

bluntfang 7y ago

>Why do people feel the need to standardize these things? Really? Because standardization leads to automation.

iainmerrick 7y ago
I'm not against automation in principle, but in this case you don't actually need to standardize before you automate. Observation: people are prefixing their commit messages with emoji! Automation: let's group commit messages by emoji, with an "uncategorised" bucket for emoji-less commits. Job done, that's all you need. The "standard" that defines which emoji to use and when can evolve completely separately. I'd argue that this standardization is actively bad, as it adds to the learning curve when contributing to a project, stifles creativity (you may only use these emoji in exactly these ways) and wastes time by encouraging bikeshedding (people adding new categories, or arguing over existing categories).
- bluntfang 7y ago
  It only adds to the learning curve because some people are adamantly against it, causing unneeded stress for adopting the standard.
  - iainmerrick 7y ago
    No, it adds to the learning curve because it adds new rules. I also happen to think they are bad rules in this case, but that’s a separate matter.

MisterTea 7y ago

> Why do people feel the need to standardize these things? I'm of the opinion that these kinds of silly arguments seem to be made by people who like hearing themselves talk. They want their name on something. They want to feel like they were a part of something. It's all ego. The rest of us are happy with pragmatism and archaic things like text, which is made of glyphs which form words which we speak.