alt Hacker NewsDo people really argue about variable names? Most reviews comments I see are fairly trivial, but almost always not very subjective. (Leftover debug log, please add comment here, etc) Maybe it helps that many of our seniors are from a team where we had no auto-formatter or style guide at all for quite a while. I think everyone should experience that a random mix of `){` and `) {` does not really impact you in any way beyond the mild irking of a crooked painting or something. There's a difference between aesthetically bothersome and actually harmful. Not to say that you shouldn't run a formatter, but just for some perspective.
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>Do people really argue about variable names?
Of course they do. A program's code is mostly a graph of names; they can be cornerstones of its clarity, or sources of confusion and bugs.
The first thing I do when debugging is ensuring proper names, sometimes that's enough to make the bug obvious.
Yes. 80% of comments to my PRs are "change _ to -" or something like that.
I have seen this mostly on teams which refuse to formalize preferences into a style guide.
I have fixed this by forcing the issue and we get together as a team, set a standard and document it. If we can use tools to enforce it automatically we do that. If not you get a comment with a link to the style guide and told to fix it.
Style is subjective but consistency is not. Having a formal style guide which is automatically enforced helps with onboarding and code review as well.