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Please post your nominations for Best of Code Review 2015 — Diplomat category:

Tough advice in an answer, delivered in the most tactful manner.

In your nomination post, please make sure to include a link to the nominated answer, as well as a short explanation of what makes that post worthy of being nominated in this category, and why it should win over the others.

Small characters at the bottom: Only one nomination per post, nominated answers must have a creation date in 2015, downvotes don't count, and Santa reserves the right to award the top-voted nominee a special bounty as a token of appreciation on behalf of the Code Review community.

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    \$\begingroup\$ What's considered tough advice? \$\endgroup\$
    – TheCoffeeCup
    Commented Jan 4, 2016 at 2:14
  • \$\begingroup\$ I'd recognise Your stated conviction leads to harm. Act on it no more. Change it, or fail. \$\endgroup\$
    – greybeard
    Commented Jan 10, 2016 at 6:55

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I'm a bit hesitant to post my answer to Connect 4 refine the diagonal check, mainly since I guess OP didn't really accept the tough advice.

I usually try very hard to understand all the code in OP, regardless of how poorly or cryptically written, but this was one of the few questions in which I gave up because I had no idea what was going on anywhere. Tact has never been my strong suit, but I tried very hard to convey the importance of readability.

The existence of this category and the desire for self-improvement on the tact front led me to completely rewrite my answer to C++ concurrency library. The OP again was completely unreceptive to any advice, culminating in the amazing comment of

My choice of naming is excellent. This is C++ standard committee whose choice was poor.

so I'm answering that question less for his sake than for future readers of the question.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ I, too, hesitated to nominate your answer to "connect 4". Somehow having spent so much time deciphering what was going on and reading the OP disregarding your answer as being not what they were asking for had me wonder if this truly was a good nomination here. But I forgot that answers are less for his sake than for future readers of the question. +1 \$\endgroup\$
    – 301_Moved_Permanently
    Commented Jan 5, 2016 at 9:50
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I'll nominate this answer of mine to code in C++. The question contained this line:

since I am the only one reading my code, readability doesn't matter to me

Naturally, that got jumped on by pretty much everyone viewing the question, but in the answer I tried to not only gently convey why readability is important, but then went on to show a version of the code half the size of the original, but with much improved readability, demonstrating one doesn't need to sacrifice readability to write compact code.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ (jumped on by pretty much everyone - with 200-success's comment not short on diplomacy) While I'm taken to the calm (staid?) tone, I fail the see the Tough advice part. \$\endgroup\$
    – greybeard
    Commented Jan 10, 2016 at 6:49

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