One of the banes of the programmer’s life is the technical review. As in many other areas of life, the words and phrases used are euphemisms for what is really meant. Here, for the aspiring nerd to be, is a dictionary that gives the real meaning for phrases used in the technical review.
Review term or phrase Real Meaning
--------------------- ------------
I'm not sure this fits in If I have anything to do
with our architecture. with it, this code will never
see the light of day!
It's not clear that ... There's no way that ...
It occurred to me in the It occurred to me while reading
shower this morning ... netnews today ...
I think that's against the That's not the way I arrange my
coding standards. {whitespace, declarations, ifs, etc.}
This logic doesn't belong in If you do it this way, I'll have to
this module. rework a whole bunch of stuff of mine.
Let's take this off line. If you carry on this pedantic
discussion another minute, I'll scream.
Let's make that an action item. There's another thing you forgot.
Do we really want the user to see Wouldn't it be funny if the user
this? saw this?
Doing it this way will be hard to I might have to maintain this
maintain. someday.
This really needs to be documented. We could just leave it undocumented.
Let's set up a time to continue the If you all didn't talk so much, we'd
review. be done by now.
This page was last revised April 29, 1976