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>Basically nothing here is specific to software. You can talk about a piece of writing exactly the same way. Even the part about patching; lots of books have re
by schiffern 2y ago
>Basically nothing here is specific to software. You can talk about a piece of writing exactly the same way. Even the part about patching; lots of books have revisions.
>I don't really see the point of focusing on software in particular before answering the general question. It's not being used to bring any special insight, and to my eye it's a false narrowing that makes it harder to answer.
I agree with the substance of this remark (the OP is indeed a general information-theoretic observation), except for the part where it's framed as a negative value judgement against the initial work.
It seems like this feedback could be trivially recopywritten in a way that elevates, rather than denigrates.
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One thing that would seem to bear mentioning is that software seems to be highly compressible. Indeed, good software seems better represented by the path, rather than the current state. An analogy here would be chess, where a state can be represented by the sequence of moves or the current board state. The analogy isn't perfect, eg since in chess the board state tends to reduce information over time. I would expect, for software, when the (dead-end pruned) sequence representation exceeds the information content of the current 'board' state, that's when you know it's time for a refactor.
- Dylan16807 2y agoHow do you turn "you are coming at this from the wrong angle and that's causing problems" into praise? If you cut my comment down to "This touches on fundamental philosophy." you could turn it into minor praise but you'd have to throw out the rest.
- schiffern 2y ago>How do you turn "you are coming at this from the wrong angle and that's causing problems" into praise? By eliminating those judgement words "wrong" and "problem," of course. ;-) A more positive-focused process might be, "that's an interesting perspective, and here's a generalization that might unlock new avenues for thinking further." Anyway, see my edit above where I offer an elaboration on your (IMO excellent) observation.
- kortilla 2y ago“That’s an interesting perspective” is not the same feedback as saying something is wrong. Don’t mince words, not everyone needs a participation trophy.
- schiffern 2y agoAgain, "wrong" is a judgement, not a fact. Whether something is "wrong" depends largely on how negative vs positive the reviewer wants to spin it. There's no objective reality to it, only a chosen emotional state at the time of writing. >participation trophy Sadly this is one of those (pre-) loaded phrases that tends to shut down thought, rather than stimulate it.
- kortilla 2y agoWriting can be objectively wrong if it contains any references to reality.
- CRConrad 2y ago> Again, "wrong" is a judgement, not a fact. Whether something is "wrong" depends largely on how negative vs positive the reviewer wants to spin it. 1 + 1 = 3 OK, go tell the world that's not wrong. > There's no objective reality to it, only a chosen emotional state at the time of writing. Oh, bullpucky. Mealy-mouthed blather like that is what brought us literal participation trophies. Some things are just wrong.
- Dylan16807 2y agoI don't see how "you are coming at this from an angle, end of comment" elevates anything. You could cut off my original comment after the first paragraph and it would still be a reasonably useful comment, but I don't think you can remove the criticism in the rest of the comment without cutting that out entirely and losing the meaning.
- schiffern 2y agoExactly why I offer a better approach. ;)