Reviews have to be balanced to circumstance. There is a big difference between putting out the sales brochure and the notice on the bulletin board. Likewise in coding a cryptographic framework for general consumption and that little script to create personal slideshows based on how you’ve tagged your photos.

As a general rule, wider distributions, public distributions, and long-lived distributions need more ambitious reviews. If the distribution is wide, public, and permanent, then everything needs very detailed scrutiny.

I have found some success in starting with and occasionally revisiting review goals. This helps create and maintain some consistency in a process that is scaled to the task at hand.

That only makes sense. We are having a conversation, not creating literature.

They should of course keep that in mind, but it’s not that “should” should always be followed by a verb directly. The problem is that “of” in this context is a mishearing/spelling of “have”, so they should in this case have written it like that instead.

should implies a verb, of isn’t a verb

“should” and “of” should probably be in quotes here?

Notes: “should of” isn’t valid, should implies a verb, of isn’t a verb. I expect you meant “should have”. Please recall this in future submissions.

😏

That’s great to hear. It’s thankfully becoming more common in general, and we can all do our part in spreading these practices.

I tended to actively evangelize for it when I was managing coders or teams. Unfortunately it’s still not all that uncommon for coders to be downright offensive when giving feedback, like not necessrily quite Linus-level rants but things like “this is idiotic, this is stupid, that’s shit, why would you do that” etc etc. The usual explanation I’ve gotten is that they’re just being “honest” and saying what they think, and it’s not their problem if the reviewee (is that even a word‽ I can’t English today) gets offended. Some even get all huffy about it, like “oh we’re just supposed to coddle them and never say anything negative so their little feefees don’t get hurt?” And I mean, yeah, getting honest feedback definitely a good way to learn, but it’s not like the only way to point out errors or problems is to be a cunt about it.

Crs r xpnsv

I stand corrected:

Me omw tell POSiX “O_CREATE” not “O_CREAT”:

I mean, there’s a difference between something being phrased in an odd or confusing way, and a pedantic comment about whether you should use a Latin plural. 90% of the time you get the latter.

Depends on how you talk and what you define as normal. How much C++ is still using C++98 and how much uses C++20? It’s pretty silly of a comparison. As someone else put it, corrections are also there for a third party.

But let’s get down to the issue. You are right, correction of English is used as an insult a lot of the time. Sometimes correction of code is also used as an insult. When correcting someone is used out of line and abused, it’s always a bad thing. Correcting someone should never be used to insult.

If you don’t mind, let’s go down a rabbit hole, if you don’t care to join feel free to stop reading here. The upshot is that you are correct because the intent behind correcting English is usually abusive.

So, I corrected you earlier but this is to create a conversation. This is something I’ve been noticing a lot in social media overall: corrections seem to create conversation where if you agree with someone it’s not typically a conversation. “Yeah, you are right…” isn’t a path to an interesting exchange of ideas. There is another way that I’d also love to encourage people to try. Asking questions and digging into why. I’ve seen this happen a few times and it feels like it’s taken more as an insult. A lot of people get defensive if you ask “Why is this something you think.” We’ve created an internet culture of correction, where correction makes conversation. I wonder if this stems from people on the internet correcting people as an insult. Anyways, thank you for reading this random tangent :D

Prescriptivism is mostly just an unprincipled mishmash of shibboleths someone pulled out of their rear end hundreds of years ago, classism, and knee-jerk reactions against language change.

For example - why do people distinguish less vs fewer to refer to countable vs uncountable nouns? Because someone wrote in 1770 that they thought that distinction was elegant, despite not actually reflecting the way English at the time was spoken.

Why is ain’t “not a word”? Because it originated in the speech of poor people, and was used less commonly by rich people. People roll their eyes at new business-speak because it comes from rich, powerful people, but look down their nose at language innovations from poor hillbillies and other disfavored groups.

And you can find writings from old prescriptivists complaining about literally every change in the language, such as hating the new ambigious use of singular ‘you’ when ‘thou’ was perfectly good and unambiguous or hating phrases like ‘very pleased’.

Oh, so you mean the whole of the contemporary field of linguistics?