Yeah, the annoying thing is the people who I generally have found to be the worst about stuff like this are old school Senior C developers, who still program like it’s 1987 and we have to fit everything into 4K of RAM.

Fortunately there’s nothing like that in my code base, I just run into stuff like that periodically when I’m digging around in other team’s server code looking for something.

My personal code readability axe to grind is nested complex ternary operators.

Every now and then I’ll see something like this

return (checkFormatType(currentObject.type==TYPES.static||currentObject type==TYPES.dynamic?TYPES.mutable:TYPES.immutable)?create format("MUTABLE"):getFormat(currentObject));

And I have a fucking conniption because just move that shit into a variable before the return. I get it when sometimes you just need to resolve something inline, but a huge amount of the time that ternary can be extracted to a variable before the ternary, or just rewrite the function to take multiple types and resolve it in the function.

Sure, but I wouldn’t really find the process of starting the conversation to find that out “small talk”. Even if there’s not a lot new most of the time, to me small talk has to be the kind of banal and meaningless conversations that basically never lead into those ‘real’ ones. How’s the weather, what about that local sports team, did you see someone bought that house/building/store down the road, etc.

I think the complicated thing is there are people you don’t really know, acquaintances, where the generic “how’s the wife and kids” is small talk, because they don’t actually really care, it’s just a generic greeting thing. But a friend asking that is different, imo.

Talking to a friend you haven’t seen in a while about what’s new in your life is basically the opposite of "small talk’. I can empathize with those kind of social interactions being hard for some people, but it’s a social skill that’s worth either practicing or finding alternative paths to accomplish if you want to make and keep friends.