It's important to tackle the highest-priority problems first. There's no point in worrying about the lack of whitespace around operators if the program doesn't work: the bugs need to be fixed first.

In particular, if the whole design of the program is wrong — for example, if it uses an algorithm with poor performance — then it's the design that should be discussed in the review. It's a waste of time to review code that is going to have to be completely rewritten.

A couple of examples:

• This question from today uses an \$ Ω(n!) \$ algorithm. Until that's fixed, it's not worth worrying about the use of global variables.
• This question tries to do code transformation at the token level without parsing. This is never going to work and so it's not worth commenting on the code.

It's important to tackle the highest-priority problems first. There's no point in worrying about the lack of whitespace around operators if the program doesn't work: the bugs need to be fixed first.

In particular, if the whole design of the program is wrong — for example, if it uses an algorithm with poor performance — then it's the design that should be discussed in the review. It's a waste of time to review code that is going to have to be completely rewritten.

A couple of examples:

• This question from today uses an \$ Ω(n!) \$ algorithm. Until that's fixed, it's not worth worrying about the use of global variables.
• This question tries to do code transformation at the token level without parsing. This is never going to work and so it's not worth commenting on the code.