I shortened some parts:
en gros, le début de “enjeux du style dans la programmation doit mettre en place les trois fondements théoriques:
et ensuite je peux les re-mobiliser a travers l’article.
I added a reference to “backwards compatibility on page 16.
I added a reference to the “benevolent dictator” re: Linus Torvalds in a footnote. I didn’t feel like it would benefit the article much to expand on the role
I added the assessment of programming style by including studies by Cox 1988 and Fisher 2008, showing that style isn’t commensurated with existing metrics, but def helps with program comprehension. I also linked the article that is on Prettier’s main page (while style matters). I’ve connected this to the limitations of the study: self-motivation is a big part of this community.
I added a paragraph on limitations of the study: yes, it’s a subset, but also it’s ok cause it might be phenomena that we can find in the broader population as well.
It must be noted that a limitation of this study is that the surveyed population might just be a motivated subset of users, putting emphasis on the correct automation of the correct style of their code. While the findings here might not therefore represent the broader software development communities, they nonetheless embody heightened forms of socio-technical interactions, which might only be more faintly manifested in other developers.
I clarified some of the metrics I have used for the study of the comments, as well as what was analyzed within these comments on page 11:
The gathered corpus consists of 12780 issues and pull requests, totalling 53673 comments. From these, we discarded the least commented issues, under the assumption that meaningful and diverse discursive interaction takes place after 15 or more comments, which leaves a core corpus of 80 issues for airbnb/javascript, 82 issues for standard/standard and 444 for prettier/prettier1. While these were the main point of focus, this study included cursory browsing of lesser issues. As a complementary to the data-heavy studies mentioned above, the approach for this analysis is qualitative: reading through all messages of the most commented issues, evaluating them on multiple dimensions: the lexical field they resort to (emotional, technical, rational, organizational), the subject’s stance (speaking as an individual or on behalf of a group), the user’s background (shown by their status as either Member, Contributor or User, as well as the other repositories of the corpus they might contribute to). Reaction emojis, used to express passive agreement or disagreement with a message, are considered qualifying markers, not creating new meanings in and of themselves.
In terms of “negotiation vs. discussion”, I’ve developed on the different instances in which the discursive action takes these different forms. For airbnb/airbnb:
shifting the interactions from a negotiation, in which parties reach a compromise, to an explanation, in which the outcome of the exchange is ultimately the alignment of the user to the views of the maintainer (p.13)
and reiterated in the conclusion:
and therefore shifting a process of negotiation in which all parties are equal, to one in which the maintainer has a larger bargaining power and, more often than not, only accepts to discuss why such a decision has been made, and not whether it should be changed (p.24)
In terms of standard/standard, and prettier/prettier, I added a concluding sentence to clarify that the discussion is about the means, side-stepping a negotiation about the ends
This shift emphasizes that the most productive issues are those based on a discussion around implementation, rather than a negotiation around style itself. (p.16)
Once again, the negotiation over the stylistic validity of the automated style guide is superseded by dicussions over its technical implementation. (p.20)
As for methodology of language, I’ve clarified why I use Habermas’s approach, particularly because he introduces a typology of discourses appearing within the context of communicative action. Additionally, I’ve added a footnote to specify that the linguistic elements I borrow from Habermas for analysis can be complemented by Jakobson’s phatic function of language. (footnote p.11)
In terms of connecting the different use cases, I’ve added a sentence in the airbnb section about how the phenomenon identified (shift to the technical) foreshadows the same phenomenon in the other repositories:
This shift, from the stylistic to the technically feasible, is a recurring pattern which we’ll also observe under different manifestations in the standard/standard and prettier/prettier projects. (p. 14)
I’ve also qualified further the description of the different projects by specifying how they resemble, and how they differ from each other (p. 15, p.18), and a qualification of how standard/standard and prettier/prettier engage in the same issue:
It has been shown that, while standard/standard shares this approach of « no-options », their justification is rather by broadening the scope of what is considered acceptable (standard/standardx, standard/doublestandard), therefore growing the community, and not relying on the fact that only one single project should exist. (p.22)
In terms of clarifying the theoretical background I rely on, I’ve also made clearer the reliance on not the sociology of organization, but rather the social role of writing in organizations, tying it more clearly to the work of Goody and Frankel. I’ve also clarified how linters, as intermediary objects, are taken into account in this process.
Here again we see the role that intermediary objects play in the productive activity of writing source code: as objects that lie in between several elements (source code, compilation process, IDE), several actors (programmers in the same team) and successive stages of a work process (drafting code, reviewing it, and committing it to production) (Vinck & Jeantet, 1995), this study will rely on this concept to highlight the very active role that linters play in these negotiations. (p. 6)
particularly, such a competence is backed « universals »: semantic positions taken as universal because they’re either based on experience (e.g. my truth), or on ontology (e.g. the truth). It is the confrontation of these universals between subjects which require communicative competence. We use here Habermas’s notion of a negotiation as a bargain: in which both parties give up something in order to reach satisfaction, and contrast it with discussion, of which the result can be the change in stance of one, or both, parties. (pp. 9-10)
Habermas doesn’t really fit: he states the necessary linguistic units of communicative competence in order to establish the best setup for talking about nice stuff like justice. His approach on “universals” is how there are those general structures of meaning which get formed, and manifest differently (e.g. subjective vs. intersubjective). There’s also a nice part about how exclusively working with dichotomies is absurd (basically).
The empirical evidence of comparative ethno-linguistics indicatesthat the structures of culturally and historically changing world views(Weltbilder) determine a system of basic, mutually interpreting meaning-components is to be presupposed
Basically he wants to beat Chomsky at his own game. But it wouldn’t be impossible to still use it in the article this way: by highlighting the use of pronouns (airbnb, we vs. feross, community), the argument of space and time (backwards compatibility, but also letting others go fork their own repo), of causation and substance (programming and the possibility for automation), obviously the category of “what is and what ought to be”, being the main one in this case.
But actually the most important parts of habermas could be mutually interpreting subjectivities, speaking from different worldviews, and how they attempt at reconciliating (or not, in which case they want to kick out). so it’s also about group cohesion, in some sense. how do you maintain group cohesion in a highly mediated/technical environment.
But actually Jakobson could still hold.:
the compromise would be to take jakobson’s referential (contexts), emotional (subjectivities) and phatic (open/close of technology)