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Super interesting, I was thinking about append-only codebases very recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27492727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id
by thom 5y ago
Super interesting, I was thinking about append-only codebases very recently:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27492727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27492727
The implications of this, with the right frameworks and processes, seem potentially huge.
- joe_the_user 5y agoThe thing is, the closest thing to append-only you have with ordinary programming languages APL and it's variants, where you can construct powerful functions with powerful primitives and methods for combining them. But the thing is that APL quickly becomes a "write only" language - as far as I know, the main use of APL someone sitting at a brockerage who can cobble together any algorithm on twenty minutes and often throws away the result afterwards. Which is to say, Unison is interesting because it seems to underestimate the importance of a program's code as document, as complete, coherent, human-readable, single-view, intentionally created text. Why hasn't the stream of ascii been replaced as the format of program in the last twenty years? It's a good question but the answer isn't that it's just matter of conservatism. There are several other things involved.
- acjohnson55 5y agoIt doesn't discard the text. The text, like the documentation and comments, are stored and re-rendered during editing. It's fundamentally textual. It just doesn't have to be stored as a one dimensional text stream.