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Comment by kemayo | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, bisect is really handy because often a bug will have been introduced as a side-effect of a change made to support something else, and if you don't know what new usage was introduced you're relatively likely to break that in the course of fixing the bug.

You can avoid it via the "just look at every usage of this function and hold the entire codebase in your head" method, of course, but looking at the commit seems a bit simpler.

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‘git blame’ is often more handy for finding the reason that the change was made, assuming you know the location of the bug. It tells you the commit and the commit message.

> assuming you know the location of the bug

Well, yes. But `git bisect` is often the quickest way to find that, in a complex system.

Blame doesn’t help when the same code has been changed multiple times since the bug was introduced.

While true, this is one reason I always introduce automated code-formatting early on. It makes git blame a bit more useful.

Automated code formatting, in my experience, never decreases diff sizes, and frequently increases them. Some of those diff size increases support git-blame, some of them hinder it. Around the boundary between two possible formattings, they’re terrible.

Code formatters do tend to force some patterns that may make the line-oriented git-blame more useful such as splitting function calls into many lines, with a single argument on each line; yet that’s not about the code formatter, just the convention. (And the automatic formatters choose it because they have no taste, which is necessary to make other styles consistently good. If you have taste, you can do better than that style, sometimes far better.)

Depends on the language and the available formatters really, I find the black/ruff formatting style in Python to be very consistent, which helps with git blame. For C++ there's no good default formatter for "small diffs" since they all, as you say, add random line breaks dependending on position of parameters and such.

With style you can do better, but having style is impossible in anything except single developer projects.

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