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More expressive representations of source code enables better merging. Merging code as opaque strings of text is a bad choice, and causes lots of problems to pr
by DagAgren 7y ago
More expressive representations of source code enables better merging. Merging code as opaque strings of text is a bad choice, and causes lots of problems to programmers every day.
- majewsky 7y ago> More expressive representations of source code enables better merging. Merging is usually easy regardless of representation when all changes are comparatively local. The problem is always merging big far-reaching changes like a complete refactoring of an entire module, and I don't immediately see how any non-text representation would do significantly better (by a wide-enough margin to justify changing paradigms) than text at assisting with the merge process in this case.
- DagAgren 7y agoHave you never got large merge conflicts because one branch made some changes to a block of code, and the other left it intact but changed its indentation? That kind of thing would not happen in a better representation.