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That's also why I dislike it: The mind that will go apeshit over trivial style nonsense will still provide unhelpful feedback on other topics... but it will bec

That's also why I dislike it: The mind that will go apeshit over trivial style nonsense will still provide unhelpful feedback on other topics... but it will become far less obvious that their comments should be downgraded. Formatters also do a poor job if your language is flexible and expressive. Great for go, but if your language is the kind that easily supports internal DSLs, formatters are not even helpful at making the code regular

Jare 2y ago
> it will become far less obvious that their comments should be downgraded. I'm curious why you think this would happen... I would imagine that their comments will now have be to about things that matter, and if they are unhelpful they will stand out more.
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  It is obvious that a style comment is of no significance, and that the person who made it chose to spend time and personal capital on something of no significance. It is not obvious that an actual code change is of poor quality. To show that takes infinitely more experience, work to analyse all the direct and indirect ramifications of both the original and proposed approaches, capacity to push back and decide that your own engineering judgement is equal or better than whoever is purporting to correct you, willingness to suffer everyone else accusing you of arrogance for that on top. Even with all of that, it's a lot harder to prove the valueless comment is valueless because the more you know, the more you know that practically every single line of code could be done 30 other ways with some valid argument for each one. It's completely insidious both for the junior and the senior. The junior has no way to know the junk comment is junk. So they internalize the comment and everyone is worse for it. The senior has it almost worse. They know enough to know they don't know everything and the comment might be valid, so they put in all kinds of work to try to figure out if they actually missed something, did they have point etc. Maybe in the end the code doesn't end up as bad as the junior just rolling over, but it sucked for everyone and the challenge was not really an intentional productive crucible, it was just a douche that everyone had to waste time and energy taking seriously. Only someone who actually is arrogant (whatever level, whichever side of the pr) has it easy. Again bad for everyone except them maybe.
  - 1123581321 2y ago
    If the seniors are too passive to say no faster and faster, and management is absent, the junior’s going to end up being the tech lead. I’ve seen this. :) It’s not necessarily even bad if there is no meaningful leadership above or alongside the junior. The fast-rising junior may end up hiring developers who are more assertive and still capable.
chipdart 2y ago
> over trivial style nonsense What's your definition of "trivial style nonsense"? Is it "something I personally don't understand or care"? Things like tabs vs spaces is important, and so is how many spaces an indentation level should take. This affects how editors reformat code, how other people's editors present the code, and even how many lines a commit has and is blamed for a change. That's why linters are of critical importance to a team, and so is adopting a shared standard and editor config. The only people who don't understand the importance of a style guide and how to make it a non-issue by enforcing tools to enforce it are those with little to no experience working with software.
- avidiax 2y ago
  I have lots of experience working with software. Linting and style guides are not of "critical importance". No business objective will go unachieved because some checkins use tabs and others use spaces. Whatever problem style issues might cause can be resolved before lunch by running a formatter and committing the result.
  - emptiestplace 2y ago
    > resolved before lunch blame.ignoreRevsFile
  - chipdart 2y ago
    > Linting and style guides are not of "critical importance". This is simply false, as attested by the huge volume of comments in this thread by those with actual professional experience working on real-world software projects. You're also oblivious to the problem domain, because otherwise you'd understand that the critical problems are not whether a space should be at the left or at the right of a symbol, but all the churn that is required to manually address style problems in PRs. Try to think about the problem. You post a PR that screws up all formatting. It takes time for a team member to review a PR. Once you start to get reviews,you notice comments pointing out failures in complying with a specific style. Whether you go the passive-aggressive path of waiting for any other team member to review your code or you do the right thing and fix the problems you introduced, that requires another round of PR reviews. The time that you take with each iteration is the time your work is delayed to be merged. Now think about how many hours per month you waste just because you can't manage to format your code properly.
philwelch 2y ago
Can you give an example of what you mean by a language supporting “internal DSL’s”?
- Jare 2y ago
  Scala would be my immediate thought. Probably also C/C++ with macros.

Jare 2y ago

> it will become far less obvious that their comments should be downgraded. I'm curious why you think this would happen... I would imagine that their comments will now have be to about things that matter, and if they are unhelpful they will stand out more.

Brian_K_White 2y ago
It is obvious that a style comment is of no significance, and that the person who made it chose to spend time and personal capital on something of no significance. It is not obvious that an actual code change is of poor quality. To show that takes infinitely more experience, work to analyse all the direct and indirect ramifications of both the original and proposed approaches, capacity to push back and decide that your own engineering judgement is equal or better than whoever is purporting to correct you, willingness to suffer everyone else accusing you of arrogance for that on top. Even with all of that, it's a lot harder to prove the valueless comment is valueless because the more you know, the more you know that practically every single line of code could be done 30 other ways with some valid argument for each one. It's completely insidious both for the junior and the senior. The junior has no way to know the junk comment is junk. So they internalize the comment and everyone is worse for it. The senior has it almost worse. They know enough to know they don't know everything and the comment might be valid, so they put in all kinds of work to try to figure out if they actually missed something, did they have point etc. Maybe in the end the code doesn't end up as bad as the junior just rolling over, but it sucked for everyone and the challenge was not really an intentional productive crucible, it was just a douche that everyone had to waste time and energy taking seriously. Only someone who actually is arrogant (whatever level, whichever side of the pr) has it easy. Again bad for everyone except them maybe.
- 1123581321 2y ago
  If the seniors are too passive to say no faster and faster, and management is absent, the junior’s going to end up being the tech lead. I’ve seen this. :) It’s not necessarily even bad if there is no meaningful leadership above or alongside the junior. The fast-rising junior may end up hiring developers who are more assertive and still capable.

chipdart 2y ago

> over trivial style nonsense What's your definition of "trivial style nonsense"? Is it "something I personally don't understand or care"? Things like tabs vs spaces is important, and so is how many spaces an indentation level should take. This affects how editors reformat code, how other people's editors present the code, and even how many lines a commit has and is blamed for a change. That's why linters are of critical importance to a team, and so is adopting a shared standard and editor config. The only people who don't understand the importance of a style guide and how to make it a non-issue by enforcing tools to enforce it are those with little to no experience working with software.

avidiax 2y ago
I have lots of experience working with software. Linting and style guides are not of "critical importance". No business objective will go unachieved because some checkins use tabs and others use spaces. Whatever problem style issues might cause can be resolved before lunch by running a formatter and committing the result.
- emptiestplace 2y ago
  > resolved before lunch blame.ignoreRevsFile
- chipdart 2y ago
  > Linting and style guides are not of "critical importance". This is simply false, as attested by the huge volume of comments in this thread by those with actual professional experience working on real-world software projects. You're also oblivious to the problem domain, because otherwise you'd understand that the critical problems are not whether a space should be at the left or at the right of a symbol, but all the churn that is required to manually address style problems in PRs. Try to think about the problem. You post a PR that screws up all formatting. It takes time for a team member to review a PR. Once you start to get reviews,you notice comments pointing out failures in complying with a specific style. Whether you go the passive-aggressive path of waiting for any other team member to review your code or you do the right thing and fix the problems you introduced, that requires another round of PR reviews. The time that you take with each iteration is the time your work is delayed to be merged. Now think about how many hours per month you waste just because you can't manage to format your code properly.

philwelch 2y ago

Can you give an example of what you mean by a language supporting “internal DSL’s”?

Jare 2y ago
Scala would be my immediate thought. Probably also C/C++ with macros.