[joshuamorton]

Which it is!

You seem to be assuming, without prompt, that nit-picking punctuation comes at the expense of a thorough overall review.

Code review on punctuation is absolutely an important part of readability. Consistency makes understanding and scanning (for human readability) and potentially parsing and modifying (for machine readability) much easier.

As someone who both reviews a lot of code and reads a lot of code, consistent documentation with good grammar and punctuation is enormously helpful.

[kortilla]

I’m not assuming, this is based on my experience at Google. People that focused on punctuation rarely provided anything more than the superficial review.

[joshuamorton]

Again you're begging the question.

People who focus on punctuation do so at the expense of everything else, sure. But people who give thorough reviews give thorough reviews, including nitpicky comments.

I've given and received thousands of reviews at Google (in multiple languages, across multiple teams), and can say that my experience has been fairly consistent: code review is high quality and detail oriented, including, but not at all limited to, small things like grammar and comment formatting.

[kortilla]

I’m not begging the question, I’m just sharing my experience from working at Google and other companies. By a wide margin, the most useless reviews were ones nit-picking formatting, punctuation, etc.

> But people who give thorough reviews give thorough reviews

Ok.

> including nitpicky comments.

Disagree. Pointing out that someone forgot to capitalize an initialism in a comment is not thorough, it’s a time suck. A thorough and competent reviewer will realize it doesn’t matter and will know not to distract the CL owner will such irrelevant trash.

Sure, there is an a small section of the Venn diagram that leaves good review comments and sprinkles in “nit:” turds, but that group is much smaller than both the fully incompetent nit-pick group and the competent reviewer group.

Seriously, unless a code comment is illegible or it’s being compiled into user-facing docs, it’s absolutely useless to leave something like “nit: it’s TCP, not tcp”.

[joshuamorton]

> Seriously, unless a code comment is illegible or it’s being compiled into user-facing docs, it’s absolutely useless to leave something like “nit: it’s TCP, not tcp”.

I think you're describing style errors, not grammar errors. For example, the Google style guide says that (certain) comments should be complete sentences. Asking people to use good grammar (and capitalize/punctuate) those sentences as though they were documentation (because they are!) is valuable for reviewers.

I say this as someone who, when reading unfamiliar code, is able to understand it more readily if the inline documentation is easy to read. "tcp" vs "TCP" doesn't impact that, but other grammatical nits absolutely due.

[kortilla]

> I think you're describing style errors, not grammar errors.

The entire thread (not started by me) is about nit-picking punctuation and now you’re trying to explain to me that I’m describing style errors. So what? It’s useless feedback regardless of which chapter in the Holy Google Docs covers it.

> Asking people to use good grammar (and capitalize/punctuate) those sentences as though they were documentation (because they are!) is valuable for reviewers.

Right, it’s valuable for the reviewers because it makes it seem like they provided feedback when they have nothing of substance to add. It’s not valuable for the author though nor is it realistically valuable to future people reading the code in question.

>I say this as someone who, when reading unfamiliar code, is able to understand it more readily if the inline documentation is easy to read.

I think maybe you don’t know what “nitpick” means. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/nitpick

If it has a meaningful impact on the ability to read it, it’s not a nitpick.

[joshuamorton]

My experience differs. Consistent and well formed prose in docstrings and comments absolutely helps reason about unfamiliar code. Nitpicking for good formatting, spelling, and grammar is valuable in code comments just the same as in documentation or any other form of technical writing.

If the comments aren't important enough to spend care and thought on, they should be deleted.

> If it has a meaningful impact on the ability to read it, it’s not a nitpick.

This is boring semantics. Given what you describe as nitpicks, we draw the line of meaningful impact on readability in different places. So I'm claiming that some of the things you describe as nitpicks in fact aren't.

[jbn]

what about nitpicks related to whitespace? These are an endless source of time-wasting, IMHO.

[joshuamorton]

At Google or in general?

The closest I've seen to this is comments of the form "can you reformat this" or "this doesn't match the rest of the file". Google's style guides have fairly strong guidance on formatting, so there's usually a "right" way (enforced by a linter), and if not, then usually you defer to the existing style in the module.

[jbn]

I meant in general. Except python-like languages that make it a non-issue, in C/C++/Java I think people attach way too much importance to spacing, trailing whitespace, tab vs spaces, and column width.

I would agree with linting or just deferring to existing style, but in truth I care little about this, it's just not significant to me (yet others seem to overvalue it, to the point of talking exclusively about this).

[thedance]

At Google (in google3) there are automatic linters that run on every change and if they fail then your change simply will not be approved for style. There's no debate about it. This is one of the great things about gofmt: either your Go program passed through it, or it did not and won;'t be accepted. Arguments about the formatting need to be in the form of a changelist against gofmt itself.

[jbn]

I agree, automating this so as to make it a non-issue is really the only way to deal with this at scale (i.e. in presence of a lot of change and many reviewers).

[shaftway]

Every team I've been on at Google has presubmits that enforce this, along with command line tools to "fix" it. There's no arguments about spacing. Nobody really cares about extra lines, but if you use tabs instead of spaces you're just wrong and your CL can't be submitted.

It's actually nice. I disagree with some of the rules and would like them to change. I think that if your if-block has a single statement and there's no else, and it all fits in a line then it's fine to inline it.

    if (theAnswerIsKnown) return theAnswer;

But I'm wrong. Because the linter doesn't allow it. So I moved on and I don't bother fighting that fight.

Edit: To be clear, I might be right, and this might be better, but I'm "wrong" in the sense that it's not linter compliant.

[jbn]

w.r.t "if you use tabs instead of spaces you're just wrong", can you expand on that?

Do you mean 'wrong' in the sense of 'wrong according to the rules enforced by the linter' or 'wrong philosophically' ? If it's the latter, how is that wrong and is not even a subject for debate?

This is an honest question, I guess I just don't see how something like this can "just" be wrong (to me it's irrelevant and not worth the ink used to write such statements in code reviews... though I'm playing devil's advocate here obviously :-) ).

PS: of course if pre-submit checks enforce the rules, then as you said it becomes a non-issue. I have been in environments where there are no such tool-enforced checks, yet people comment on it endlessly, routinely blocking code reviews for whitespace issues...