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by innomatics 1736 days ago
Thank you! I agree with so much in this, it really strikes the right balance of clean code vs productivity.

One of my peeves is a review that points out a bug/incorrectness without offering proof, or suggesting the fix/correct way. The reviewer might observe a code smell, but it's so much better dealt with a question-comment, e.g. "did you try?" vs "this looks wrong".

I generally aim to make every comment a question ("can we..."), and not make assumptions that the author didn't think of something already. Unless I just stating an objective fact that is clearly unknown e.g. "this duplicates library function x...".

1 comments

Yeah the general style of putting comments into questions is much better.

But that's not exactly what I meant with question-comments, I sometimes genuinely don't know why are they doing something like this, or have to ask for additional testing/evaluation/analysis/profiling results before I can decide that it's most likely not going to blow anything up. And as long as there's low probability of damage (or rather low expected value of damage) I am happy with the change :)

What really helps is a style guide. It shuts most of those pointless style nitpicks, God I hate them.