The biggest factor for me has been when an employer promises changes to how
the tech team is managed and then doesn’t deliver on them. To a certain
extent all teams struggle with the trade-offs between spending time
developing good specs versus staying agile, and between addressing technical
debt and building new features. But I’ve left companies after years of
chaotically fighting fires while simultaneously needing to build new
features, or after repeatedly getting disorganized braindumps or single line
descriptions from stakeholders rather than the thoughtful, detailed specs
they’ve promised.
This is everything and describes my current situation perfectly! It's so difficult to program as well as design specs and UI and manage time as well. It teaches you a lot but it's much easier if what you are being asked to build is clear in the first place!
They don't tell builders "give me a house, I want turrets and a fence and 23 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms and I want it done to a really high finish by next week".
Instead they get a detailed, industry standard, multi-stage plan that has everything they need to start, as well as access to an architect that can check on their work and when things go wrong a process for change management is included. And no-one expects a house to be built well over a weekend.
That makes no sense. The original text doesn't use preformatted line breaks and is wrapped to the screen width, quite readably. You're not fixing or improving anything in the quoted version of it by code-blocking it. You're just making work for yourself by sticking in manual line breaks and indenting, and making work for the reader who may have to scroll horizontally if their screen width is narrow, plus triggering a switch to a monospaced font.
You can quote a long paragraph that is represented as one big line very simply like this:
> That makes no sense. The original text doesn't use preformatted line breaks and is wrapped to the screen width, quite readably. You're not fixing or improving anything in the quoted version of it by code-blocking it. You're just making work for yourself by sticking in manual line breaks and indenting ...
I cut and pasted my own paragraph above. I typed a single > character in front, a space, and a pair of asterisks around it.
Is the code block format not explicitly designed for quoting lengthy snippets of text in a non-disruptive way?
>You're just making work for yourself by sticking in manual line breaks and indenting
Not much work, just a handful of keystrokes with the right software, and that's without optimizing the flow much. Could get it down more by making a macro.
>making work for the reader who may have to scroll horizontally if their screen width is narrow
While true, if the quote is indeed lengthy, wouldn't this serve the reader better than a line of text that wraps many times? Those are hard to follow.
>plus triggering a switch to a monospaced font.
Yes, this improves readability by making the barrier between quotation and response more readily visible.
The only downside seems to be that the block may clamp down to a horizontal scrollbox before some reader wants it to do so. For the record, on my computer (3440x1440 raw, some HiDPI settings make effective resolution significantly smaller), I never run across such blocks that require manual scrolling. On my phone, I do need to scroll horizontally, but I think that's nice. I have not yet seen it actually break a page or make it unusable.
I don't think it's a good technique for short line snippets, but yes, I do think it improves readability for long (paragraph-length or longer) quotes.
> Is the code block format not explicitly designed for quoting lengthy snippets of text in a non-disruptive way?
No, it's designed to preserve alignment and line breaks by using a monospace font and not wrapping, specifically for the purpose of presenting source code. It's modestly useful for tabular data for the same reason. It's not good at all for normal text, especially large blocks of text.
>It's not good at all for normal text, especially large blocks of text.
I mean, I disagree. It looks and seems better to me. I understand that the font is monospaced but I don't see that as a problem. I understand that the text is put inside its own horizontal scrollbox instead of wrapped automatically, but again, I also don't see that as a problem for a lengthy block of text. I agree it would be annoying to have to scroll on every quotation anyone made.
When I say long blocks of text, I mean a snippet that is 60 lines by 60 columns, like the transcript excerpt I posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13976410 . Personally, I would rather scroll past that than scrolling past a long italicized, autowrapped block every time I came to the thread.
People keep saying it breaks the layout in some cases, and if so, then they are right to ask that people refrain from using it until the bug gets fixed. However, I haven't observed such breakage happening, and no one I've asked has shown it. At the moment, it appears to be a personal preference thing.
