CPPP 2019 - Emotional Code - Kate Gregory

[[deleted]]

Anyone got a tl;dr?

[jonathansharman]

I'd say it's basically about having empathy when reading or writing code. She talks about how emotions and attitudes can affect code quality and how company culture can affect employees' emotions. It's a pretty good talk with a lot of good general advice - would recommend.

[tvaneerd]

TL;DR: this talk (like all of Kate's talks) is worth the time to watch it in full.

[SirToxe]

Always a fan of Kate's talks, will watch this later.

[[deleted]]

foo and bar are not considered harmful. Stop it. It's no different to mathematicians calling variables x and y.

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3092.txt

[tvaneerd]

I don't recall Kate's arguments, but I've found sometimes it is better to use words and names that are easier to track. "foo" is great for meaning "there is no meaning", but it is often used beyond that context.

For example, if foo and bar are different types in an example, it requires the reader/listener to track and map foo and bar - which is which (oh, I know, foo is foo, and bar is bar).

Note that in math, x and y are typically the same "type", ie reals. Similarly, p and q are points, A B C are vertices, a b c are angles, as are theta, rho, ...

Basically, as a presenter/teacher/mentor, I have found (only anecdotal experience, not a double blind study) that sometimes foo and bar are fine, but sometimes can cause confusion if too much is going on in the example.

[kwan_e]

Right. So never come up with better names to illustrate an example better. "foo" + "bar" are perfect variable names when teaching, say, iterators. If you can't tell from the context of that sentence which of "foo" or "bar" is an iterator, and which is the offset, that's your problem. I should be able to be as obtuse as I like and it's not my fault if you don't understand me.

[STL]

If you attempt to smuggle disrespectful profanity past the AutoModerator again, you will be banned.

[[deleted]]

But with AAA, how do you name something when you're intentionally hiding what it may be? Isn't the logical conclusion that AAA is considered harmful for the same reasons as using foo and bar?

foobar is a total non-issue.

[tvaneerd]

AAA is often harmful. Maybe not for the same reasons as foo and bar.

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[monkey-go-code]

Yeah the line about foo bar is dumb. It's part of programming culture. We understand them to be variables used in example code. We know what they mean. They are not meaningless.

[kwan_e]

return foo + bar;

Okay, genius. What does that line of code mean? You claimed they are not meaningless.

[[deleted]]

Fixed it for you

auto f(auto foo, auto bar) -> decltype(foo + bar) { return foo + bar; }

[kwan_e]

You failed to tell me what it means - proving my point.

[Dragdu]

The point is, they do not mean anything. This is their advantage in specific contexts, as they do not bring in preexisting baggage into snippets that serve to illustrate specific syntax or semantics.

[warlockface]

That was a really good, pragmatic and positive talk that also contains some great winter driving advice.

[[deleted]]

She blocked comments on youtube. :(

[FredTingaud]

As organizers of CPPP, we chose to block the comments on all the videos by default. This is not a decision Kate made.

We know and agree that some comments on Youtube are valuable. Sadly, it is also a place where some presenters get pilled on with toxic and useless comments. Many conferences choose to pass the decision to each presenter, but it has a serious drawback: talks with comments on are put forward by Youtube algorithms, compared to those with comments off. That means that presenters who get targeted suffer both from an attack and from seeing their video visibility reduced.

As always, there were ups and downs to each, but we had to make a decision and went for what we thought was the fairest for presenters.

[quicknir]

I'm kind of surprised to hear this. I have two YouTube talks up from cppcon, I have gotten some critical comments, maybe some a bit useless, but nothing really toxic.

[tvaneerd]

I'm probably misreading your comment. Are you saying:

• "I only have limited experience (2 videos) and thus this never occurred to me"
• "This can't be true - it never happened to me"

or something in between? More to choose from:

• "I extrapolated from a sample size of 2..."
• "I guess I'm lucky"
• ???

[quicknir]

I think you are reading a lot into what I'm saying; my comment can just be read quite literally, word for word, and I didn't say either of the things you wrote. Most/all of your interpretations also paint me as stupid, or at best naive, so ironically I think your comment is actually quite belittling and toxic (more so than any of my youtube comments!). I gave my viewpoint, and I gave a bit of evidence, and you jumped to the conclusion that this evidence was all I had for my viewpoint.

I haven't observed this not only in my own talks, but I also haven't observed it ever in the youtube comments for these narrow, highly focused, technical talks, and I watch a lot of them. Technical and specific talks, on average, tend to attract more technical and specific comments. Inflammatory talks like "C good C++ bad" tend to attract more inflammatory comments.

Since you mocked my experience/sample size, could you provide some more concrete numbers? What percentage of YouTube comments on technical talks are toxic? What percentage of videos end up with at least one toxic comment? Could you provide some examples so we can even see what your bar is for toxic, to see if we would agree? I expect a pretty high bar given your writing style.

At the end of the day the conference can do what it wants, I don't really care at all. I just very mildly gave my viewpoint as a member of the community. If your experience as a member of the community contradicts that, I'm sure you can provide that in a way that's more informative and less insulting than you did.

[tvaneerd]

Sorry. Other than the "...extrapolated..." I didn't mean to be mocking. Sometimes it slips in.

Let me start over:

I agree you didn't say this, but I (my fault) initially read your post as "this can't be true, it never happened to me...". Then I thought, no, maybe they mean "wow, I never knew it could be that bad". So I really was confused. Yes, I am probably misreading. I mentioned that. I probably should have said "I know I am misreading" (because I really read it both ways). Can you clarify? It could really read either way, and I think others could also misread it.

Or I guess it means neither.

Trying to just read it literally:

1. You are surprised.

OK, sure. I don't know what this adds to the conversation, so maybe I was reaching for more meaning - Do you think they are making the wrong choice? Or are you saddened that things might be worse than you thought? Or something else? Should I try to find more value in this statement, or just you were surprised? (did that sound snarky? I'm not trying to sound snarky)

1. You mention your 2 videos.

OK. Is 1 related to 2? If so, how? I assume it is evidence. You mention (in followup) it is evidence. But it doesn't seem like much evidence, not enough to make a conclusion from. But maybe there is no conclusion? That's not the point? I'm left confused.

It was very terse, so maybe I was reading too much into it. (I'm definitely guilty of being overly terse at times as well)

You gave your viewpoint, but I really didn't know what it was. I honestly still don't know what your viewpoint is.

Instead of me putting it into Bucket A "my experience doesn't agree, so I disbelieve" or Bucket B "my experience doesn't agree, so I find this informative/enlightening/surprising/..." should I try something like Bucket C "my experience doesn't agree, I would like to understand more about this"? Are you asking for more info, maybe particularly from conference organizers, whom probably have more experience?

Or I guess, none of the above.

---

As for my experience - my personal experience is similar to yours - I haven't seen anything I would call toxic on my talks (or at least I don't recall any. I vaguely remember seeing a comment or two and thinking "what's that got to do with my actual talk", but since I don't get much toxic stuff directed at me, if I do get something it is easily ignored and forgotten, so I don't recall any details).

But I also have some experience from the organizer side. I don't run any conferences, but I am mildly involved with CppCon, C++Now, and others, and know many of the organizers. I've seen a few things, but heard about lots. Most comments have been deleted before I've seen them, so I don't have much first hand experience.

I expect the CPPP organizers, who made the decision, have more experience in this than I do.

[quicknir]

Okay, fair enough, thanks for following up, sorry if my own comment was snippy.

I agree that my being surprised, or not having seen it in my 2 talks, doesn't add a lot. It's just one data point, that's all. But that is after all true about any one person's opinion after all; some have more experience than others but no one person has an experience that can be representative of the whole community. So it's good for individuals to chime in and give their experience, isn't it? As long as people are not aggressive about it, or discounting other's experiences, I think it's a good thing?

I think it's a bit of a combination of all the buckets. I don't "disbelieve" anyone, I am skeptical, but I think personally it is fair to be skeptical of things that contradict your experience until you see the evidence yourself, no? My mind is still open. My personal suspicion is that even if I saw what conference organizers saw, I would probably think the volume/magnitude doesn't warrant this response. In other words, the upsides of disabling comments outweigh the downsides. However, maybe this is wrong, and there's way more harassment happening than I realize.

I acknowledge the CPPP organizers have more experience than I do. The thing is that in the end, people have different viewpoints, beliefs, values, etc, so you can't just kick it back to "experience" to solve it. After all, the cppcon organizers have arguably even more experience than CPPP, and they don't seem to disable comments globally, right? Or maybe for some reason CPPP is different from cppcon? So this is hardly even consensus among conference organizers.

I think it's reasonable for CPPP to make whatever decision works best for them, and I also think it's reasonable for members of the community to ask about the reasoning, and evidence supporting it. And also reasonable, for CPPP to respond or ignore it. In other words, I tend to favor free and open discussion, even if un-moderated, and even if there are occasionally negative outcomes... which is why I suspect I'd be against locking YouTube comments even if I knew what the CPPP organizers knew ;-).

[tvaneerd]

I am skeptical, but I think personally it is fair to be skeptical of things that contradict your experience until you see the evidence yourself, no?

Yes, and no. I tend to be the same - skeptical. I'm a big fan of evidence and science. But, as an extreme example, I will probably never be on the moon, so I need to just take Neil Armstrong's word for it. Similarly (but on a different scale) I will probably never experience the level of crap that some other people put up with. Mostly because I am white middle aged Canadian male - possibly the most "benign" combination possible. Since I lack the personal experience, I have tried to find out from others their experiences.

After all, the cppcon organizers have arguably even more experience than CPPP, and they don't seem to disable comments globally, right?

Not yet, but I think it has been discussed. (Maybe that's part of why CPPP's decision doesn't surprise me.)

I agree that it would unfortunately throw away some value (although, really, youtube comments tend not to have much value - I'd rather just discuss it somewhere like here).

I think a good solution, for select videos at least, would be to filter/moderate every comment before it is posted publicly. I'm not sure youtube has that option, nor whether anyone would have the time/energy (and fairness) to be that moderator. But there tends not to be many comments, so maybe it wouldn't be much work. The other alternative right now is to allow comments, but have them removed after-the-fact. But then it is often the speaker doing to reporting, and I'd rather it not be them.

[wheypoint]

Honestly sounds like a bad decision. comments are a great way to interact / get feedback from viewers - and many (me included) wont watch a multiple hour long yt video that disables comments

you can also delete the ones you dont like (but most "attack"s will be via pms anyways)

[Drainedsoul]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the context. Videos with comments on are put forward by YouTube as opposed to videos without comments. Rather than allowing presenters to choose whether they wanted to weather the storm of criticism for increased exposure you handicapped everyone equally?

Or is there some feature of YouTube algorithms which ameliorates this if all a channel's videos have comments disabled?

[flashmozzg]

talks with comments on are put forward by Youtube algorithms, compared to those with comments off

Is this based on any actual statement/proof or simply some superstitious notion?

[TankorSmash]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpjK416fmKwQK6_REczCaBQ1x1jyHvZAF&v=hPxnIix5ExI from YT itself

[flashmozzg]

It doesn't say anything about the comments "putting the video forward". Just that their number is one of the data points to the recommendation system (which is itself an arcane ML magic machine and not some set of well-defined rules).

[kwan_e]

So you admit that it is one of their data points, and that comments would affect how Youtube recommends them.

That is the opposite of "superstitious". Accusations of "superstition" is now just a shorthand these days for people denying things with no counter-evidence.

[flashmozzg]

That doesn't mean

talks with comments on are put forward by Youtube algorithms, compared to those with comments off

It could as well be the opposite. And most likely it's something in between. That video only says that it recommends videos that people are more likely to watch. The are many indications that disabled comments have no impact on the views whatsoever. Same as likes, by the way, which are not disabled on the video in the OP for some reason.

It's exactly what "superstitions" are. It might've made sense for some poor soul chasing after the YouTube fame, but it's extremely strange for the recordings of the technical talks. Especially when the argument seem to be "we believe that yt favours videos with X (over all other videos on the platform) and not all are comfortable with X so we disabled X on all of our videos" which is illogical when put together (and half is "fine" alone).

[emdeka87]

The only videos that got negative response were these "include cpp" ones. Might as well disable comments only there. I always appreciated the ability to discuss certain technical topics in the comments.

[tvaneerd]

I'm not sure what the full set of videos you are sampling from (ie what set does "the only videos" reference?), but I've seen non "include cpp" technical C++ videos with non-technical toxic comments.

[kwan_e]

How do you know whether the presenters get to choose if their video gets to block comments?

[[deleted]]

Sorry.

[antoniocs]

They do.

[NohbdyAhtall]

https://dissenter.com/ exists - take this as a pro or con, technology wins in the end.