[Minor49er]

> Subversion docs are clear that it's a snarky name and that 'svn praise' and 'svn annotate' are neutral synonyms.

A few years ago, some Atlassian developer changed "Blame" in the BitBucket UI to "Annotate". I remember a lot of people being frustrated because they couldn't find "blame" anywhere and the change was never officially announced. It just happened one day

Someone opened a ticket with BitBucket about it which ended up drawing a lot of attention from frustrated users who couldn't find "blame", and their searches for it on Google led people to the ticket. Atlassian eventually responded saying that they made the change because "blame" sounds bad and can hurt people's feelings somehow (with no examples given of course, though ironically the dev who made the change certainly had hurt feelings after the upset masses had some choice words for the short-sighted decision. Though Atlassian doubled down and I believe closed the ticket without reverting the change, so the confusion remains, as far as I know)

I don't think that they ever mentioned the Subversion/CVS parallel that was drawn to choose that name, so it was really confusing why that was selected. But this comment shed some light on that ancient incident

[anilakar]

If I ever saw an "annotate" command I'd immediately assume it's for adding notes as metadata outside the actual software versioning tool, not for seeing who wrote the code in question.

Nomenclature matters. Do not reinvent terms just for fun.

[justusthane]

Agreed - I don't understand at all how the word "annotate" is being used here. It seems like "substitute" would be a better standin - as in "To whom can I attribute this code?"

[awesome_dude]

> ironically the dev who made the change certainly had hurt feelings after the upset masses had some choice words for the short-sighted decision.

Dev probably became the public face for a decision made by someone else (eg. Product owner, TL, whatever the business structure is in Atlassian)

[ge96]

I'm not in disagreement about being able to tell who wrote some piece of code, I like gitlens in my vscode for ex.

The feelings hurt thing is real, unfortunately for myself I am that person that gets butthurt but it's a phrasing thing, "why did you do this?" vs. something more neutral sounding like "hey this has this side effect are you aware".

Anyway unfortunately in my case too we're not allowed to write tests so it really is an exercise in omniscience.

[Minor49er]

I'm curious if you have experienced people asking something as blunt and short-sighted as "why did you do this?" as the result of a blame. The blame should reveareveal the PR or commit that a change came from which should answer that question already

You should also write tests. They ensure that your code works as intended. Some teammates might not understand that untested code can cause more development time since broken features will have to be fixed in production, so highlighting bugs that have to be fixed as well as writing tests thst cover as many cases as possible should shine some light for those still not understanding their value

[ge96]

That's the thing, I used to think tests are annoying but now I'm advocating for em, maybe a sign of growing up ha. Unfortunately not my call. Yeah it's just tone, tone changes the outcome of some conversation. Puts person on defensive, stops thinking, that kind of thing.

[Minor49er]

I mean, I get it. Priorities can also affect things. I'm in a similar situation at work where the manager is pushing to get a project out as fast as possible at the expense of testing and even basic planning. It's only serving to make things much worse because all of the short sighted decisions are causing all kinds of new problems that could have been avoided entirely

Sometimes it's easier to adopt better practices when moving to another team or project altogether