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by randomchars
1551 days ago
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> When it comes to code reviews, it’s a common phenomenon that there is much focus and long-winded discussions around mundane aspects like code formatting and style Does this really happen, or has it just became a meme? I haven’t worked at any company where we did not have auto formatting set up with a common style config, along with some form of linting. |
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At my previous job, we had enforced automatic code formatting in pull requests, but most of the code was not (yet) formatted, and people were afraid to bulk format the code. I wrote a script that picked a few files periodically, formatted them, and auto-assigned a review. They hated it. Eventually I turned it off. I wasn't even pushing the style, by the way, just working with the most "legacy" code.
Before that, I worked on a team whose TL offered to hand-reformat my submissions, because clang-format didn't get his personal style right.
At my current job, we're a team of two and we know what we're doing, but there are some nits that have lead to lengthy, albeit adequately self aware, discussions (mostly C++):
- Is it ok to use assert()?
- Is it ok to use std::string literals? ("hello there"s)
- Should errors reported by an API have a corresponding error message? Should the error message be contextual?
- Should an API report fine-grained errors or just a component-wide failure value?
- Is it ok to add more logging? Is it just noise?
- Is it ok to report errors using exceptions?
- Are stringstreams too slow?
- Is it ok to write a strict parser for a specified format?
- Does a parser need a corresponding fuzzer?
- Is it ok to use macros for conditionally compiled multi-level logging?
- Should functions have contracts documented in source comments?
- Are regular expressions overkill?
- Should we use /bin/bash or /bin/sh?
- Is it ok to use exec in a shell script?
- Single quotes or double quotes?
- Should the release process be automated?
- How often should releases occur?
- Are variant types ok?
- Is RAII a useful technique or is it over-complicating code-hiding?
- Is this "simple code"?
... The list goes on and on. Can you guess, based on this list, what it is we work on? No, you cannot.
A team could vote on a Coding Style Guide to decide many of these things, but does anybody follow those? If you're going to give someone a hard time, you give them a hard time. </rant>