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Conventional Comments

conventionalcomments.org

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51–60 of 74 posts

Re: Conventional Comments

#51

Post by Smaug123 »

Eiriksmal wrote: post #43
aabbccdde wrote: post #6

Only tangentially relevant: I hate the word 'nitpick' (bad experience with small insects - thinking about nits makes me itch), but I don't know any other word for these "small, trivial, but necessary changes." Does anyone have alternative words they use in reviews instead?

I'm also not a fan of this phrase, which is whipped out to be "helpful" in reviews at my current employer--probably after the last time this website or one similar to it bubbled up on HN. To be clear, the (American) dictionary definition of nit-picking is "minute and usually unjustified criticism." In other words, this is definitely not a positive thing to do, which is why this word has such strong negative connotati…

Au contraire: if I give you ten "nitpicks", the fact that it's "minute criticism" means that you explicitly have licence not to feel bad about it. I use the word "nitpick" in a review to induce the reaction of "sigh, I'll make your tiny change", possibly with "I-the-author don't care but apparently you-the-reviewer do for some reason" and "it's all Smaug123's fault for being unreasonable" if the author needs someone to blame mentally for the fact that the PR isn't approved immediately. It's an explicit label/reassurance that no important fault lies with the author.

This is very possibly a team culture thing, though. We all know that the code is what matters, and we are all studiously not letting our egos intervene, but we can help each other not get too attached by deflecting the blame onto the reviewer rather than the author in this tiny way.

Re: Conventional Comments

#52

Post by Smaug123 »

renewiltord wrote: post #48

I appreciate the intention behind these things. However, I do not feel like this method is better than to just use the English language, if everyone is fluent in it. For instance, `praise: nice test` sounds a little weirdly robotic in the way that if you were to walk up to someone and say "I am now going to give you a compliment. You are wearing a nice dress."

[I agree with you, with qualification]: sometimes we do need to disambiguate by announcing our mental state at the beginning of a comment!

Re: Conventional Comments

#53

Post by brujoand »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #50
zerd wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very easy to seem rude in text comments, even if it was not meant that way at all. "Change 'this' to 'that'" is much harsher than "Could you change 'this' to 'that'?" It's a small change in wording, but it changes the interpretation from "This is wrong, do this instead, I know better than you" to "I think this is a better way to do it".

Is it really? I can find instructions disguised as questions condescending, for example. I believe no amount of wording will help if people are not trusting each other. I would rather work on team building than comment guidelines.

Yes and no. It depends on the team and the culture. My favorite was when I worked in a team of only senior engineers we would leave comments like 's/this/that/g other than than LGTM'. This was all that was needed, no fluff.

In other teams, a comment like this would have meant a chat with HR. We can't make rules for these things, because people and thus teams are different.

Re: Conventional Comments

#55

Post by duckmysick »

renewiltord wrote: post #48

I appreciate the intention behind these things. However, I do not feel like this method is better than to just use the English language, if everyone is fluent in it. For instance, `praise: nice test` sounds a little weirdly robotic in the way that if you were to walk up to someone and say "I am now going to give you a compliment. You are wearing a nice dress."

The tagline of the page is "Comments that are easy to grok and grep".

If it sounds robotic, it's because a part of the target audience are robots, so to speak. And they are not fluent in English, whether they are using regex and wildcards or statistical sentiment analysis.

Re: Conventional Comments

#57

Post by Cthulhu_ »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #50
zerd wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very easy to seem rude in text comments, even if it was not meant that way at all. "Change 'this' to 'that'" is much harsher than "Could you change 'this' to 'that'?" It's a small change in wording, but it changes the interpretation from "This is wrong, do this instead, I know better than you" to "I think this is a better way to do it".

Is it really? I can find instructions disguised as questions condescending, for example. I believe no amount of wording will help if people are not trusting each other. I would rather work on team building than comment guidelines.

But instructions are given by superiors, while code reviews (generally) by peers. If someone you don't respect starts barking "Change 'this' to 'that'", would you?

I mean sure, in some cases you can completely disassociate from the human side of code, disregard a comment's name in favor of objective truth or however you want to word it, but in a lot of instances you still have to share the same office with that person.

Re: Conventional Comments

#58

Post by Cthulhu_ »

manoDev wrote: post #29

It seems I disagree w/ many points. > - Leave actionable comments > suggestion: This is not worded correctly. > Can we change this to match the wording of the marketing page? If I already know how it should be, I prefer to quote it right away and save work, instead of asking and leaving room for misinterpretation. Asking also seems dishonest if I'm not truly inviting a discussion. I would still add a rationale so oth…

I haven't done code reviews in forever, but when I did them, sure there were some things that were plain wrong, but there were also a lot of things where I wasn't sure if it actually needed a change - a confirmation from the developer would be required.

And then there's things that I would like to see changed, but as a personal preference; when it comes down to it, it doesn't make a difference and I don't really care, so I would posit it as a suggestion instead of a command. Mind you, if I didn't really care either way, I could've chosen to ignore it as well. But you know how some people get <_<

Re: Conventional Comments

#59

Post by preordained »

frou_dh wrote: post #56

Nerds get a big rush from creating rule systems. And doubly so if then able to foist them on others!

Yah, I have to say material like this getting any attention really accentuates the feeling I get that we're scraping the bottom of the barrel for how to improve in software. It seems like we're more and more focused on the (relatively) superficial...language ergonomics, conventions, etc

Re: Conventional Comments

#60

Post by sradman »

This document is inspired by Conventional Commits but lacks the equivalent Specification section. The point of adding structure to unstructured text is specifying the syntax required to make it machine readable. Maybe I’m missing something.
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