Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by patrick451 1643 days ago
> Although I push for a lot of upfront agreement, most of the back and forth arises from little things, like a variable name being too long, a newline between struct members, or a docstring that could be removed because the code is expressive enough.

This pedantry is a cancer. If your PR comment starts with "Nit:" just shut up and go do something useful.

2 comments

> This pedantry is a cancer. If your PR comment starts with "Nit:"

I have worked in companies where sloppyness was culturally acceptable. I found that a much worse cancer because there is no fixed line when sloppyness is cosmetic and when it affects code quality and maintainabilty. Code quality just did deteriorate over time as little things started to accumulate everywhere.

Yes, review discussions are tedious, but having an ever deteriorating code-base is worse.

I don't think so.

Nit comments are how I indicate areas where I would have done something different but I don't feel strongly enough to block your PR over it. Could be some formatting that I think could increase readability or some code you didn't touch in your PR but if you have time while you are in this file you could improve while you are there.

I always stress these don't block PRs and for the most part they are subjective. I still find it valuable to share these perspectives as they offer gentle ways to impart the smaller parts of "good taste" that make programmers well versed in such things a pleasure to work with.

"Good taste" is just your opinion. Framing it this way makes it sound canonical, which it is not. We all have opinions on what good taste is, and they all differ. To see this, all you have to do is go read the codebases of all your dependencies. They all taste different. Which is my point. These comments are useless noise.