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A comment on To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they're right. Parent comment

Re:To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they'r... by hcarvalhoalves on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @03:21AM (#12486176)
> I have found programmers to be far more receptive to blunt criticism than my other non-programmer friends.

The work of a programmer is to sit in front of a soulless machine that has no inhibition in telling the programmer made a mistake on his code at regular intervals.

You need to be pain intolerant to be a programmer, while in other roles pain avoidance is the norm.

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Re:To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they'r... by namaemuta on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @06:06AM (#12486734)
Actually, a machine never accuses you of being the responsible of that error. It usually says "there's an error in the line..." but never addresses it towards the programmer even though they know that they are the responsible ones of that mistake.

And in fact, that is one of the techniques of conflict management between partners, addressing the problem instead of finding the responsible of it.

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Re:To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they'r... by shostack on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @07:13AM (#12487004)
Sounds like an opportunity for a more opinionated error logging tool...

"@Dave, you seem to have made yet another type error on line 56. @jon recently committed code that didn't fail any integration tests. Why can't you be more like @jon?"

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Re:To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they'r... by namaemuta on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @08:20AM (#12487444)
Hmm... I wonder what would be the implications of one with positive reinforcement:

"Wow @Dave! that's the smartest code I've ever seen! just one thing, there's a probably-not-that-important error on line 56"

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Re:To tell someone they're wrong, first tell them how they'r... by RodgerTheGreat on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @11:42AM (#12489273)
Positive reinforcement which is perceived as insincere will at best have no effect and at worst be seriously insulting. I can't imagine how an automated system which says vaguely positive things about code that it cannot understand would be seen as anything but insincere.

If you build a system which successfully encourages actual humans to say nice things about one another's code _and mean it_ while incorporating constructive feedback, it would work beautifully, but that is a markedly more challenging problem...

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