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I'm working on a git replacement, in a way. The thing that makes git powerful is that its just text. Git is probably the most powerful thing for code as text. W

I'm working on a git replacement, in a way. The thing that makes git powerful is that its just text. Git is probably the most powerful thing for code as text. When code no longer is just text (and by "text" I mean bytes on disk, not that we're switching to coding with emoji or VR) you get to do more powerful stuff. Our plan in Dark (https://darklang.com https://darklang.com) is to combine all the different ways that people "branch" (deployment, feature flags, git branches, staging/dev/prod environments) into a single concept. And then we also plan to combine all the ways to "comment" (PRs, slack messages, commit message, code comments) into a single concept. Not sure if you'd call that a git replacement, but it's a displacement of sorts - the function of git is replaced by non-git.

zestyping 7y ago
Sounds intriguing! Can you say more about what that single concept is and how it works?
- pbiggar 7y ago
  To be clear, it's two concepts, one for branches and one for comments. The first concept we've been calling deployless, and discussed it here: https://medium.com/darklang/how-dark-deploys-code-in-50ms-771c6dd60671 https://medium.com/darklang/how-dark-deploys-code-in-50ms-77... The second one is just an idea right now, suggestions welcome. The observation is that comments on a particular line of code are spread in as many as a dozen places (a google doc, slack, trello, the code itself, an old version of the same code, PRs on github, comments on commits on github, commit messages, another place in the codebase referencing this one, the docs folder in your repo, another repo that uses this API, your 3rdparty docs on README.io, etc). This is weird and bad, and it must be possible to do better.
  - shalabhc 7y ago
    For comments, fully agree that we don't need several isolated systems (source files, docs, commit messages, ...) How about one system which is a hypermedia system and can hold many different kind of objects. So annotation objects can reference 'code objects' such as types, fields, functions or even blocks directly. Not sure if Dark gives each of these an identity (it should) which will make it possible to refer to them via hard links rather than text snippets. Once you have all code and comment objects in one hypermedia system, creating views from that is about multiple projections of the interconnected objects. Wouldn't it be great if I can use a query to refer to 'all functions that reference this type' inside some docs? Or list all annotations that reference a function? These could be embedded inside annotations as well. Gtoolkit does something similar. Perhaps even a 'branch' can be thought of as a subset of the hypermedia graph. E.g. using a code block X2 instead of a code block X1 within the same function.

zestyping 7y ago

Sounds intriguing! Can you say more about what that single concept is and how it works?

pbiggar 7y ago
To be clear, it's two concepts, one for branches and one for comments. The first concept we've been calling deployless, and discussed it here: https://medium.com/darklang/how-dark-deploys-code-in-50ms-771c6dd60671 https://medium.com/darklang/how-dark-deploys-code-in-50ms-77... The second one is just an idea right now, suggestions welcome. The observation is that comments on a particular line of code are spread in as many as a dozen places (a google doc, slack, trello, the code itself, an old version of the same code, PRs on github, comments on commits on github, commit messages, another place in the codebase referencing this one, the docs folder in your repo, another repo that uses this API, your 3rdparty docs on README.io, etc). This is weird and bad, and it must be possible to do better.
- shalabhc 7y ago
  For comments, fully agree that we don't need several isolated systems (source files, docs, commit messages, ...) How about one system which is a hypermedia system and can hold many different kind of objects. So annotation objects can reference 'code objects' such as types, fields, functions or even blocks directly. Not sure if Dark gives each of these an identity (it should) which will make it possible to refer to them via hard links rather than text snippets. Once you have all code and comment objects in one hypermedia system, creating views from that is about multiple projections of the interconnected objects. Wouldn't it be great if I can use a query to refer to 'all functions that reference this type' inside some docs? Or list all annotations that reference a function? These could be embedded inside annotations as well. Gtoolkit does something similar. Perhaps even a 'branch' can be thought of as a subset of the hypermedia graph. E.g. using a code block X2 instead of a code block X1 within the same function.