Open Stack

On 2013-11-11 12:19, Clint Byrum wrote:
> Excerpts from David Kranz's message of 2013-11-11 09:58:59 -0800:
>> I have seen a wide variety of -1'ing (and in many cases approving)
>> patches for minor spelling or grammatical errors and think we need a
>> policy about this. Given the large number of contributors for whom
>> English is not their native language, I would be in favor of rejecting
>> spelling errors in variable or method names but being more lenient in
>> comments, commit messages, READMEs, etc. What do you all think?
>> 
> 
> The point of code review is to find defects. Misspelled words are 
> defects
> in the English language encoded in the change. In fact, commit messages
> in particular are critical to get right as they cannot ever be fixed,
> and they are generally the most useful when under a stressful situation
> trying to determine the nature of a regression.
> 
> Many of our contributors are also newbies to python, and we do not let
> them get away with obvious mistakes in python code. English is just a
> language with a different interpreter (a more forgiving one, for sure,
> but also one with many versions at various stages of implementation).
> 
> In fact, our large percentage of non-native english speakers is a 
> reason
> to be extremely careful about grammar and spelling so as not to confuse
> non-native speakers with incorrect grammar and spelling.

I was just writing the same thing when I saw your e-mail.  It's hard 
enough to understand English when it's written properly, and stuff like 
docstrings tend to be written once and read many times by many different 
people, so it's important to get them right in the first place.

-Ben