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UMM-CSci-3601 / 3601-iteration-template

This template repository is used as a starting point for course projects in CSci 3601: Software Design and Development at the University of Minnesota Morris. It includes an Angular client along with a Javalin server and Mongo database.
MIT License
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Consider adding the "In Solidarity" check #1008

Open NicMcPhee opened 2 years ago

NicMcPhee commented 2 years ago

In reading through some Angular code, I noticed that they had an "In Solidarity" check. Looking that up surfaced the In Solidarity bot, which basically checks your code for language that is problematic for certainly communities and/or has troublesome historical connotations (e.g., "master", "slave", and "whitelist").

It looks like it would be pretty trivial to add this to our projects. I doubt (hope?) it would turn anything up for us, but might be useful to catch things in student work?

The big downside at the moment is that there are currently very few checks (only 7). This is good in the sense that they're not just shotgunning every expression that comes to mind without thinking it through, but less winning in the sense that it really doesn't change much but perhaps giving the illusion of caring. (Perhaps a bit like checking for appropriate contrast, and deciding you've done due diligence on accessibility.)

kklamberty commented 1 year ago

I think adding this to the iteration template may be helpful if it goes along with the student copies of the template, but otherwise it's not likely to have much impact. If it becomes a check, that makes sense. If it behaves like dependabot, it won't be as helpful since that doesn't seem to come along with templates (not sure if that's accurate). It would be nice to include it if it can serve as an automated reminder of a few things to avoid since many of those things are otherwise embedded in many places in the way that people talk about, write about, and code computing systems.

NicMcPhee commented 1 year ago

I think that as a GitHub Action it will travel along when the students create their copies of the repository.

If you wanted to see what it's like in practice, we could try creating a little demo project repo with this added and then explore what happens when we use it in GitHub Classroom. If we like it then we could come back to the iteration template.

floogulinc commented 1 year ago

It is not a GitHub action and would need to be configured for each new semester organization. I think we want to avoid extra things like this and personally I think this in particular is unnecessary. It only checks for 4 words by default and if this functionality is really desired it would probably be better suited as a VS Code extension students can choose to install themselves.

kklamberty commented 1 year ago

It would be nice if we could add something to checkstyle or some kind of linter --- is that something to consider?