Why Code Snobs Are Invaluable
mjswensen.com
mjswensen.com
When you first get a comment like this, it may feel like friction. After all, the code works. The cost of holding up a deploy and changing your code feels all out of proportion to the benefit. And it’s easy to extrapolate this: “If I get this objection to every pull request, I’ll never get anything done!”
But you don’t need to get this objection to every pull request. If the objection has some merit, no matter how trivial, you can change your naming, and never hear this objection again.
And the entire code base will be a little bit better. Your change is for now, a little bit better is forever, and everyone changing the way they name variables to be a little bit better adds up to a lot better.
And so it is with other forms of code snobs. Although it may feel like it’s not worthwhile to change the code today, if it’s a meritorious objection, then the right thing to do is change it and learn to write it that way the first time around, to develop a habit of writing it that way.
And then everyone will end up being a little bit better. And with every new commit, the code will get better. And that adds up like compound interest into making the code a lot better.
They seem to have just as much of this argument on their side, as far as consistency and such. Yet I actually loathe the decisions, as it causes a ton of friction with standard tools.
Naming seems cut-and-dried, but there are other cases that aren’t so clear cut. What if there are two factions in a team, one of whom are very OO, the other are very functional?
Whether it's variable names, your brace style or indenting lengths, it doesn't matter if you think your way is the best, what matters is fitting in with the existing (shared) codebase so it's readable to everyone who has been working on it for the last 5 years.
Same is true for non-style things. If your project is 100K lines of 1998-era "C-with-classes" C++ code, your modern, templated, header-only, lambda-using work of art is going to cause more friction than it helps.
Circles of people who all agree to do something wrong and reinforce each other in it are one of humanity's big problems...
I, for instance, loathe the prescription that the names of .NET interfaces begin with "I". This is because I realized that once you understand the difference between a “class” and a “type”, then it becomes obvious that everything is an interface (abstraction is just naming things). But, the .NET style guide hinders that understanding since it enjoins you to focus on the little things (classes and interfaces) instead of the big things (types)[1].
So, “code snobbery” is about figuring out what you really want, and then creating cognitive affordances (or eliminating cognitive hinderances) with respect to that.
[1] This is especially apparent when you consider how interfaces and classes are defined in F#.
That said, the more I work with components and smaller services in node.js, the more I enjoy it. It's nice to be able to write meaningful unit tests without several layers of indirection just to be able to write tests.
Like inverse (or reverse) technical debt. Excellent way of putting why code reviews are important.
I would just add that while improving adds up, it shouldn't cover the fact that blocking the team because of camel case issues is not the best use of time. There are static analysis tools that are free and open source that can do this work.
We are spending between 1/5th to 1/10th of our time reviewing code[1]. Most of the times the disciplined have to carry the burden of being 'that guy' that always has something to say.
1: http://www.quora.com/How-much-per-day-or-week-do-engineers-s...
That usage of "idiomatic" feels idiomatic to me. ;)
(I'd usually bite my tongue about such things, but your nic is picks_at_nits, and the thread is about the virtues of being pedantic...)
Then there are those that insist on highly flexible and overly engineered solutions. Yes, they got it to work. No, they aren't doing any favors to anyone that was wanting to pick up the code and make changes. (Been there, done that. On both ends.)
Basically, if you encounter a large amount of friction for every new contributor to your codebase. Consider that the source of that friction is not necessarily the "low quality" of the contributors.
If your colleagues really are your peers -- in that you trust each other, don't get pissed off when someone else makes a stupid comment, or when someone points out (hopefully politely) that you made a stupid comment -- then "code snob" is a joke term.
If you aren't lucky enough to have fallen into one of those high performance teams, then both types exist: the helpful code snob and the condescending one. The latter isn't help at all.
HA! You're straight up wrong. You're never going to find someone more motivated to BE right. They don't care about appearing to be right for lesser people. If you have skin thick enough to tolerate them they'll be immensely valuable. Also, their attitude is a huge disadvantage in the workplace causing them to be far more exploitable (cheaper) than their peers.
Better a consistent-but-suboptimal architecture than a random grab bag of varying quality.
However sometimes a singleton is in fact more maintainable and improves the code massively. Nor do they have to be less testable when implemented well.
None of which detracts from the article which is about consistency in the code base. A knew jerk reaction to the singleton completely misses the point.
I suspect dependency injection has the same problem: you could achieve the same results in a non-object-oriented language.
It enabled us to decouple some code deep down in our architecture and enforce some constraints around the use of this particular piece.
When you actually need a singleton it's best to use one and call it out as such so people know what they are dealing with. Dependency injection will often be passing around a singleton everywhere without people being aware that it's a singleton and all that that means.
But a "code snob" is not necessarily correct just because he is a snob and sounds confident. There is sometimes a calibration problem where someone is trying hard to enforce practices which are actually wrong, or argues vehemently against things which are normal and okay. This is actively counterproductive and it would be better just to have less enforcement.
One way to check for this calibration would be to ask whether the snob is advocating something that will obviously benefit people beyond the snob objectively, e.g. fewer broken builds or adhering to a widely used standard style. A useful reviewer isn't just pushing his own agenda.
Concrete example: if you're building a system to last 5-10 years, act like it. Spend time getting the architecture, the variable names, and the module structure correct. But realize not everything must be built to last. I read somewhere else on HN that some groups inside of Google plan a piece of code to handle 10x growth in traffic/storage/resource use before it's thrown out outright and rewritten -- so don't overdesign.
Maybe the real lesson is to invest in sufficiently good modularity that it's easy to throw things out without too much pain. Nothing lasts forever.
Some people are convinced that making components isolated and aesthetically clean is more important than making them functional.
This is really interesting. Can you elaborate on what they might have been thinking when commenting out those tests? (which seems pretty blatant). Were the tests commented as to what they were doing, and obviously were important, relevant, and should have passed?
My impression is that when you go to a higher (cleaner) level of abstraction, you lose some immediate abilities. For example if you move a global variable without classes to a static variable in the class it really belongs with (after writing that class), you can never (by doing that) enable additional functionality over having it be a global variable. But the variable might no longer be accessible at some point, perhaps if a different base class has a static member whose initialization depends on another one already being initialized - that sort of thing.
which is the whole point. you are applying a new abstraction, and in the new abstraction they're not global variables but properties of a class. Perhaps some tests become irrelevant or need to be rewritten.
So, you could have some test fail as written, because you've moved to a higher level of abstraction. This makes me wonder what the exact tests were in the case you refer to...
This (sw design) is a multidimensional optimization problem with a somewhat vague cost function. But argmin on the # of bugs and argmax on feature completion is far more important than everyone following some random standard.
The person commenting on his pull request was not being a snob.
He was making sure there was architectural coherence across the board.
Some of the best pull request comments for me have been the ones that made me say, "Dammit! .... you're right." Many of those PR comments have been replaced by impersonal linting tests that do the same, but the net result is still that I feel proud of what I write.
Are we first graders?
What is the goal of this software? Ship now? MVP?
Are we trying to polish the software? Or just get it to work? Is it a prototype?
Some thoughts to take into consideration.
Management sets a clear deadline, we rush the code to get it done by its due date. Then the product sits there for months doing nothing while we're in between projects wasting time away. Half a year down the road we get asked for support because some things broke which would've been working fine had we taken the proper time to built them.
From personal experience, most businesses don't think in terms of maintenance and debugging. These are costs which can very quickly add up to way more than the saved development costs.
This seems to be so common. Almost every project seems to break or have issues at some point and the excuse is always the same: oh we didn't have time to do it properly. It makes me wonder if that is indeed always the case. This leads to a question... are there projects that are done in enough time so that they won't break?
But I agree this isn't the norm.
The advantage is that tools reject the pull request, and not a person. It doesn't harm ego to be rejected by a tool.
In OP's example, the singleton is a design pattern, not a coding standard. It should be used if it is applicable to the scenario, as it seem like it was.
Other people here in the comments are talking about "code snobs" as people that like to follow certain coding standards. IMHO, coding standards should be defined by the entire team and everyone has to follow. There is no way to have a consistent code without that, so it is not about being snob, it is about having a consistent codebase.
Now, if there are coding standards or an architecture defined but someone wants to use a different one because they want to be snob about it, then you have a problem. If there is a standard, let's say a naming convention as a simple example, and someone wants to change it at some point, you either have to change everything else to follow the same new standard, or don't start a new standard at all. Otherwise you are not resolving the original issue, you are simply making it worts by having more than one standard in your code base.
By that I mean that they don't know how to fix poorly structured code, suggest a better algorithm, or improve the interface... but they still want to feel and look useful, so they instead burn a lot of time finding relatively trivial things to change.
And you know what? No one complains. If you don't want nitpicks, conform to the coding standard of the place of which you work. It is _their_ code after all.
It is a useful pattern for managing data synchronization (ie, if I only ever have one instance of a User, I know another instance won't mess up its state accidentally.)