Should there be a code-review forum?

Question

Forgive me if there already is such a place on stackexchange. I'm new here and definitely don't really have the hang of the place as yet. But I haven't found such a forum.

What I think would be helpful (for me) isn't really appropriate for a 'question', unless the question is "what do you think of this code?" which seems inappropriate. I'd like to be able to post some code that is as good as I can make it and get feedback and suggestions from all the folk here that know a lot more than I do. This would accelerate my progress quite a bit, and might be useful for others as well.

I'm speaking of writing macros, packages, and classes, not layout questions or questions that can be answered by reading one of the commercially available books. As far as I know, there is no place on Earth where such a *TeX code review process happens, and it seems like this is the natural place for it.

Comments?

Answer 1

Somewhat in common with the other answers, my initial reaction is against the idea.

My difficulties start around about the question of differentiating between a clear case of "I've gone as far as I can, what else can I do?" and "Here's some junk I threw together.". If my tex macro files are anything to go by, they are a complete mess of half-hacks and "cargo cult programming" held together by the flimsiest \ifs and \ofs to ensure that nothing conflicts with anything else. I'd would love to have someone take a look at that and (gently) point out all my mistakes, but I feel that that really would be a waste of their time.

Far better would be for me to identify the weak point in my code and ask a very, very specific question on that. I could include a little context, and thereby allow for someone to say, "By the way, you can collapse those twenty \expandafters to one \noexpand.".

So try to identify a task in your code, say, "Here's how I do X. Is there a better way?". Then you're not asking someone to rewrite your entire code, but just to give you a helping hand along the way.

SE is optimised for short, concise answers to focussed questions. It took me a while on MathOverflow to realise that, but now that I have then my life on the SE sites is a lot more relaxed!

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One more thing. You comment about different methods of learning. Absolutely, there are many different ways of learning something. However (and this is why I don't really participate in math.SE), I'm not paid to teach you (or anyone else) anything here. To properly teach something where you aren't already most of the way there, I'd have to know a lot more about your background, what you already know, more about what you're trying to achieve, and so forth. That is too much information for the amount of time I have to spend on these sites. I'm happy to help, to share what I've learnt, but to a fellow traveller, not to someone at the start of their journey.

That may read harsher than it actually is. There's a heck of a lot that one can learn just by having someone, at the crucial time, say "Go left at the crossroads.". The SE architecture is set up (it seems to me) to help us identify those crossroads and stand there saying, "Go left here.". If lots of us are standing at lots of crossroads, then that's almost as good as having a guide for the whole route.

Answer 2

After looking through some discussions on meta.so (e.g. this and this), I think the policy there is that code reviews are okay if used in moderation. The key paragraph seems to be

As long as there isn't a super massive chunk of code and the author of the post is pretty clear about what areas he is looking for critiques on, I don't see a problem with it.

People there are also suggesting to use Refactor My Code, but that doesn't have a TeX category, so it doesn't apply to us.

So, IMO posting short bits of code and a description what it should do and then asking something like “Is there a better way to do this?” is acceptable.

Answer 3

Bev,

First off, welcome to TeX&Co., enjoy your stay, and help yourself to some questions!

There has been some discussions recently on meta.TeX (can't find the question right now) about a similar issue. AFAIR, the general agreement was that these are okay, as long as they are formulated as [meaningful] questions. In your particular example, it could look something like:

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I'm trying to do [foo] in my thesis, and I tried the following:

<<decent amount of black magic code and helpful comments>>

That works all right, however, my [bar] is not exactly [squiggle], so I tried then packages tikz (people always suggest this), and [shnoo]. I couldn't make this work, so I'm looking for help on how to typeset my [bar]. Also, I would want to do this in {Con|Lua|La|Xe|XeLa}TeX{t|}, but I'd settle for a TeX solution as well.

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Also, we had some discussion lately on whether answerers should try to improve submitter's code beyond what she requires -- fixing obsolete packages and commands, for example, and the general consensus seems to be that it's perfectly okay, if the time permits.

Answer 4

This might be a good use for chat....(since we still haven't found one for it...)

Answer 5

I'd normally ask on c.t.t. in these cases