Hacker News Reader

Comment by ants_everywhere | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure it's about who wrote the code.

'git blame' is named after the subversion and CVS blame features that do the same thing. Subversion docs are clear that it's a snarky name and that 'svn praise' and 'svn annotate' are neutral synonyms.

Perhaps someone familiar with CVS can comment on its history there since it seems to be the first source control to add it.

EDIT: and one of the main reasons it's a useful feature is it tells you who to talk to to understand a piece of code, or to coordinate a roll back, or to do any other sort of communication. It probably matters more in a big company where code is changing frequently and you're unlikely to know everyone and what they're working on.

View on HN

> 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

> 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)

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.

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?"

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.

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

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.

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

Yes, the history of the name is as you write. But the value of the command lies in finding the commits, and, especially, in finding which lines changed together.

> EDIT: and one of the main reasons it's a useful feature is it tells you who to talk to to understand a piece of code, or to coordinate a roll back, or to do any other sort of communication. It probably matters more in a big company where code is changing frequently and you're unlikely to know everyone and what they're working on.

It's actually a pretty awful feature because it misses so much context. I've been blamed before for changes which were technically my fault, but while my code was to spec, some unrelated part of the code I was interacting with was not (iirc it was some multi-threaded nonsense like a race condition or something).

It was a super-stressful week of constantly having to defend my design decisions and white-boarding my thought process (think of the "am I taking crazy pills?!?" scene in Zoolander) as my senior coworker tried to gaslight and throw me under the bus.

Maybe I've had a uniquely bad experience with it, but I've vowed to never use it (as a way to attribute `blame`). Code should be holistically understood and it's your job as a technical leader to know how the parts move, resolve issues without drama, and make sure your whole team is on the same page: this is a cohesive team, not an adversarial dick-measuring contest.

That sounds like an awful workplace culture. I doubt the name of the git command is responsible, though.

Just know that it can also be used in very positive ways.

For instance, I may want to change some basic behavior. Easy enough, spend some time implementing and testing, and then run into a downstream consequence of that change while implementing. Now I need to make a decision. Reviewing the history of the relevant sections of code, using git blame, can help me uncover the context and ways in which the code I'm puzzling about changing has changed previously. This can be incredibly valuable and speed up or even obviate an amount of discussion around the potential change.

> It's actually a pretty awful feature

Obligatory T-Shirt link

https://www.amazon.com/Blame-Ruining-Friendships-Since-T-Shi...

I acknowledge that I have no idea what happened in this situation. Please don't take this as me justifying mean behavior.

> Code should be holistically understood and it's your job as a technical leader to know how the parts move

That's true when we design something. Once the design is done, and is broken, we have to tear it back apart to understand WHAT is broken. That's when blame is useful.

I love using git blame. I love it even more when it comes back with something I made, because then I get to learn. When something I thought was safe turned out to break something, that's an invaluable chance to understand the system better.

That being said, I've totally used the blame output to end a series of excuses from a junior about how "his code was definitely right, but everything else was garbage" because I really do not care. If it worked before, but doesn't work now, that's a problem. Part of the modern process of "fail fast" is also to build up taste about which parts of a working system are spooky.

I find that some people take the "blameless" culture too far, and use it as an excuse not to reflect on outcomes. They just ruffle the code whenever there's a big, and don't think critically about why that bug appeared. What that tells us about the system we're making.

I work at a company with a mess of a monorepo but the git history is a gold mine. It's fascinating digging back into history and reading why certain decisions are made, or random pitfalls the author discovered, or context that was missing. It absolutely feels like a bit of a detective mystery trying to dig back and figure out if some line of code is a bug that was meant to do something else, or is functioning as intended and the requirements changed, or something else entirely.

Ofc as my org has gotten bigger, we've lost a lot of the discipline around writing good commit messages so now it's just a mess of large code-changes with 1-line "bugfix" explainations :(

> Ofc as my org has gotten bigger, we've lost a lot of the discipline around writing good commit messages so now it's just a mess of large code-changes with 1-line "bugfix" explainations :(

I have a battle at the moment to try and get the team I am in (5 devs) to take their git commit messages and history seriously, but the "TL" has said that he "doesn't care that much about commits/history/etc"

That bit us right on the ass when debugging someone elses branch recently, because the state needed to fix was across three seemingly unconnected commits, so a checkout of one commit + fix then needed to be tested across two other commits.

This is why blameless post-mortems and a healthy culture are important. I'm sorry you encountered such a hostile culture. Perhaps "git blame" has the wrong name, but the idea of traceability is still important.

Aviation is the shining example of this, combining high traceability (you should be able to track each part back to the factory and to all the technicians who have worked on it) with accident inquiries that are focused around finding cause and avoiding future risks rather than assigning blame.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com