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And I only half-agree that version control isn't important in writing. Certainly in (collaborative) non-fiction (e.g. science papers), most of the same merging,

And I only half-agree that version control isn't important in writing. Certainly in (collaborative) non-fiction (e.g. science papers), most of the same merging, cutting, reinstating and backtracking that helps with programming would be of huge value to authors. I can think of dozens of smart non-programmers who I think would relish a friendly Git for writers - it would, of course, have to be called Writ...

mechanical_fish 16y ago
It's a big UX design problem to come up with something demonstrably better than a series of saved milestone copies plus Word's "Track Changes" feature. The milestone copies are the equivalent of commits. If your doc is in Dropbox you probably get them for free, but there's definitely room to improve the interface to those old copies. Track Changes is the prose version of "diff", plus it lets you put in editorial annotations which are kind of akin to commit messages. I expect that the designer who attacks the problem will quickly realize that prose is just much less clearly structured than code. Code is built of very simple syntax, grouped into lines, which are grouped into blocks, which are often named as functions and then called from other bits of code via tightly defined interfaces. This is done to make the code easier to change, and it simultaneously makes the changes easier to track, easier to categorize and label and annotate. (That's not a coincidence; "making the diffs neater" and "making the code easier to change" are aspects of the same task.) Prose does not look or work like code. It is not DRY, not at any level of abstraction from the grammar (change "he" to "she" and you may have to edit a lot of other words, not necessarily confined to one sentence or one paragraph) to the semantics (because English doesn't have a gender-neutral pronoun, a substitution of "he" for "she" threatens to alter the actual meaning of a sentence, and of adjacent sentences) to the theme (in 2010, a novel about a man who becomes President of the USA is necessarily different from a novel about a woman who becomes President of the USA). And so it is a lot of work -- work beyond the powers of a simple algorithm -- to detect which edits are logically grouped with which other edits. Composing sensibly organized "commits" and writing the "commit messages" for each revision of The Waste Land would probably be harder than writing the poem itself. Just ask one of the historians, whose job it is to do so. If you are a historian with all the time in the world, an Etherpad session of T.S. Eliot composing The Waste Land would be awesome. But would it have been so awesome to Eliot? Or would it have been only marginally more useful than his typed and scribbled hard-copy revisions? Or maybe even less useful? Forgetting is a very useful skill. We've got fancy mental mechanisms for managing the process, and those mechanisms evolved for a reason.
- rlpb 16y ago
  > If you are a historian with all the time in the world, an Etherpad session of T.S. Eliot composing The Waste Land would be awesome. But would it have been so awesome to Eliot? This is the key. We want to see that revision history and only in retrospect for a tiny proportion of writers in the world. I'm not convinced that the writers themselves have any motivation to do so, especially with the UX complexities that as you point out would be necessary. If the people in the position to do it have no motivation to do it, it won't happen. And then there's the other side of the coin. A writer may prefer not to show people drafts. Imagine a politician doing it. At the moment we vet things before we publish them. We do this for various reasons including for confidential information and to avoid upsetting people. How much more of a burden will it be to vet all revision history for this too?
ebiester 16y ago
Point them to scrivener. It's no git, but you can take snapshots of your work, rearrange by scene, keep notes, it's a very writer-friendly editor.

mechanical_fish 16y ago

It's a big UX design problem to come up with something demonstrably better than a series of saved milestone copies plus Word's "Track Changes" feature. The milestone copies are the equivalent of commits. If your doc is in Dropbox you probably get them for free, but there's definitely room to improve the interface to those old copies. Track Changes is the prose version of "diff", plus it lets you put in editorial annotations which are kind of akin to commit messages. I expect that the designer who attacks the problem will quickly realize that prose is just much less clearly structured than code. Code is built of very simple syntax, grouped into lines, which are grouped into blocks, which are often named as functions and then called from other bits of code via tightly defined interfaces. This is done to make the code easier to change, and it simultaneously makes the changes easier to track, easier to categorize and label and annotate. (That's not a coincidence; "making the diffs neater" and "making the code easier to change" are aspects of the same task.) Prose does not look or work like code. It is not DRY, not at any level of abstraction from the grammar (change "he" to "she" and you may have to edit a lot of other words, not necessarily confined to one sentence or one paragraph) to the semantics (because English doesn't have a gender-neutral pronoun, a substitution of "he" for "she" threatens to alter the actual meaning of a sentence, and of adjacent sentences) to the theme (in 2010, a novel about a man who becomes President of the USA is necessarily different from a novel about a woman who becomes President of the USA). And so it is a lot of work -- work beyond the powers of a simple algorithm -- to detect which edits are logically grouped with which other edits. Composing sensibly organized "commits" and writing the "commit messages" for each revision of The Waste Land would probably be harder than writing the poem itself. Just ask one of the historians, whose job it is to do so. If you are a historian with all the time in the world, an Etherpad session of T.S. Eliot composing The Waste Land would be awesome. But would it have been so awesome to Eliot? Or would it have been only marginally more useful than his typed and scribbled hard-copy revisions? Or maybe even less useful? Forgetting is a very useful skill. We've got fancy mental mechanisms for managing the process, and those mechanisms evolved for a reason.

rlpb 16y ago
> If you are a historian with all the time in the world, an Etherpad session of T.S. Eliot composing The Waste Land would be awesome. But would it have been so awesome to Eliot? This is the key. We want to see that revision history and only in retrospect for a tiny proportion of writers in the world. I'm not convinced that the writers themselves have any motivation to do so, especially with the UX complexities that as you point out would be necessary. If the people in the position to do it have no motivation to do it, it won't happen. And then there's the other side of the coin. A writer may prefer not to show people drafts. Imagine a politician doing it. At the moment we vet things before we publish them. We do this for various reasons including for confidential information and to avoid upsetting people. How much more of a burden will it be to vet all revision history for this too?

ebiester 16y ago

Point them to scrivener. It's no git, but you can take snapshots of your work, rearrange by scene, keep notes, it's a very writer-friendly editor.