5 ms·

But, who cares? If this worked for the developer, what's wrong?

by korijn 5y ago

mey 5y ago
Prevents collaboration with others, ability to rollback to a specific release to test a bug, partially developing multiple ideas. All of that is possible manually, but it is doing version control by hand. There are plenty of great tools out there to simplify that process. And if you start automating your manual custom process, you just end up at your own version control system that is something additional you have to mantain.
est31 5y ago
* Free sync across multiple devices * Ability to roll back to some older state. often I have dismissed some solution only to later realize that I need it again, or parts of it. If I have ever committed it, it's still around. Even if it is an orphan commit now, or in the extreme case, if it was once in the staging area you can still recover it later, at least until garbage collection has deleted it. But whatever rocks your boat I guess.
- eru 5y ago
  Also the ability to see when what feature of the code was introduced. That can help a lot with understanding code bases: people seldom comment their code properly, so any context you can get is good. (In my opinion, really good code can often answer 'what' and 'how' without comments, but it has a hard time answer 'why', and an almost impossible task of answering 'why not'? Ie 'why not' this alternative approach? Whether the answer to that one is "we tried it and it didn't work" or "we didn't think of it, you are a genius for bringing it up" or something else can be important.)
- hinkley 5y ago
  There is barely a week that goes by that I don’t start off with a good idea but halfway through I realize I’ve taken a wrong turn or bitten off the wrong chunk first. If it weren’t for git or more frequently Jetbrain’s local history, my output would be lower quality. And what the Mikado Method teaches us is that when a refactoring gets out of hand, there’s a much smaller refactor hiding inside it waiting to get out. Erosion history is both a blessing and a curse here, but generally there are bits you can salvage without falling into Sunk Cost.
kovek 5y ago
Seems like the some of the best work is done in thinking during menial tasks moreso than during actual coding time!
ashtonkem 5y ago
Nothing until a catastrophe causes lost work, or if they wanted to collaborate with someone else. In fact, right now the main DF developers are working with a partner studio to put a better UX on DF to sell on Steam. I bet an industry standard version control would be extremely helpful right about now.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
  I don’t doubt that the lack of VC is causing that project’s delayed release. It was announced nearly three years ago.
viraptor 5y ago
It depends whether the process is part of the art itself, or just the result. If someone wants to be the excel artist (https://www.spoon-tamago.com/2013/05/28/tatsuo-horiuchi-excel-spreadsheet-artist/ https://www.spoon-tamago.com/2013/05/28/tatsuo-horiuchi-exce...), that's cool even if other tools would give them more possibilities. But in this case, the 80s development style is neither part of the art, nor is it better in any way at all, so people keep pointing out that this decision is just objectively worse than doing the absolute minimum of modern version control.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  I get your point, but it's also not entirely accurate to say the workflow and tools aren't part of the art. Creativity is a fickle thing, and it's unlikely that steps X,Y,Z would produce the same inspiration as A,B,C. I agree that modern version control would offer benefits, but maybe in moving to git Tarn would decide to sha1 everything internally, which would have some ultimate impact on the game that results.
  - viraptor 5y ago
    > not entirely accurate to say the workflow and tools aren't part of the art. That workflow/tools is not something they advertise, are proud of, or concentrate on. We know about it from a random interview only, so I don't see a reason to count that as part of the DF-as-art.
    - bashinator 5y ago
      I think you're talking about the artistic _product_, and the ethernet bridge is talking about artistic _process_. Like, you don't care what kind of paintbrush a painter uses, but it matters a lot to them.
em3rgent0rdr 5y ago
git blame so the developer can remember why they did something 15 years ago.
dudus 5y ago
He should care. The effort to learn git would have saved him time. Time he could have used to improve DF or to sleep, whatever. But instead he's still moving folders around. I believe it's a balance. You don't want to spend your life just adjusting your IDE settings to the point that you never work on your actual project. But you shouldn't completely neglect anything that could improve your life with little effort. I confess I'm guilty of "procrastination by configuration". I probably spent a year of my total career life just messing with my settings or getting the perfect git or vim configfiles.
- tzs 5y ago
  I think you may be overestimating the amount of time and effort it takes to move folders on a modern computer.
  - technofiend 5y ago
    I don't disagree he needs a source code control system. But it's his intellectual property and right now he has some protection through redundancy. At least I certainly hope he keeps some USB sticks with a friend because if not one house fire and his livelyhood is gone. If he goes online he has to worry about someone hacking his account, if he keeps it at home we're back to what is his backup strategy, what does his redundancy model look like, and that's just not losing anything he already has. Next he needs to git's enough to be effective. Not that it's hard but if you've never used any sccm before it can be intimidating, and all of it takes time. It may just be easier to say later, later, later because you don't want to take however long it'll be to move and you're thinking of all the lost development time. Of course if he ever really needs it (house fire, tornado, hurricane) the price will the seem quite cheap. In the meantime I'd at least find a way to backup off-site even if it's scp'ing passworded zip files to an Azure VM.
lordnacho 5y ago
> But, who cares? If this worked for the developer, what's wrong? Chances are it didn't work for the developer. I've been in places where people were versioning by folder, and pretending it was fine, because they didn't want to learn how to do it properly. They'd come up will all manner of excuses that git/svn/hg/etc had already dealt with. "It's easier to just copy paste", "It's a waste of my time to spend time on a VCS", "What if we both change the same file". I've heard them all, and when I look back at the colleagues who said this, they produced a lot less than they ought to have. Not just because of version control, it's one among several software red flags (never commenting anything, not having tests, not making an effort to make things work on other people's machines, etc). I'm not going to say anything bad about the DF guy, this seems like a strange foible, but in general not using version control is a major red flag that someone is actually a bit of a novice who is low on productivity. Version control is the big one, because if you're productive you tend to write a lot of code, and you'll tend to have hit the same issues that everyone has when they're writing a lot of stuff.
- capableweb 5y ago
  > I'm not going to say anything bad about the DF guy, this seems like a strange foible, but in general not using version control is a major red flag that someone is actually a bit of a novice who is low on productivity. Sure, not using version control in an environment where collaboration is to be expected (like in teams/companies where you work with others), I'd agree with you. But that's not Dwarf Fortress, it's just a single person doing the work. Obviously Tarn is not "low on productivity" or "a bit of a novice" since he have done something many of us will never do in our entire life, create entertainment that will forever live in some peoples memories. Just because he's not using Git, doesn't mean it's a red flag, since using Git would basically give him zero benefits and just add more to learn for again, zero benefits.

But, who cares? If this worked for the developer, what's wrong?

by korijn 5y ago

But, who cares? If this worked for the developer, what's wrong?

mey 5y ago

Prevents collaboration with others, ability to rollback to a specific release to test a bug, partially developing multiple ideas. All of that is possible manually, but it is doing version control by hand. There are plenty of great tools out there to simplify that process. And if you start automating your manual custom process, you just end up at your own version control system that is something additional you have to mantain.

est31 5y ago

* Free sync across multiple devices * Ability to roll back to some older state. often I have dismissed some solution only to later realize that I need it again, or parts of it. If I have ever committed it, it's still around. Even if it is an orphan commit now, or in the extreme case, if it was once in the staging area you can still recover it later, at least until garbage collection has deleted it. But whatever rocks your boat I guess.

eru 5y ago
Also the ability to see when what feature of the code was introduced. That can help a lot with understanding code bases: people seldom comment their code properly, so any context you can get is good. (In my opinion, really good code can often answer 'what' and 'how' without comments, but it has a hard time answer 'why', and an almost impossible task of answering 'why not'? Ie 'why not' this alternative approach? Whether the answer to that one is "we tried it and it didn't work" or "we didn't think of it, you are a genius for bringing it up" or something else can be important.)
hinkley 5y ago
There is barely a week that goes by that I don’t start off with a good idea but halfway through I realize I’ve taken a wrong turn or bitten off the wrong chunk first. If it weren’t for git or more frequently Jetbrain’s local history, my output would be lower quality. And what the Mikado Method teaches us is that when a refactoring gets out of hand, there’s a much smaller refactor hiding inside it waiting to get out. Erosion history is both a blessing and a curse here, but generally there are bits you can salvage without falling into Sunk Cost.

kovek 5y ago

Seems like the some of the best work is done in thinking during menial tasks moreso than during actual coding time!

ashtonkem 5y ago

Nothing until a catastrophe causes lost work, or if they wanted to collaborate with someone else. In fact, right now the main DF developers are working with a partner studio to put a better UX on DF to sell on Steam. I bet an industry standard version control would be extremely helpful right about now.

SOLAR_FIELDS 5y ago
I don’t doubt that the lack of VC is causing that project’s delayed release. It was announced nearly three years ago.

viraptor 5y ago

It depends whether the process is part of the art itself, or just the result. If someone wants to be the excel artist (https://www.spoon-tamago.com/2013/05/28/tatsuo-horiuchi-excel-spreadsheet-artist/ https://www.spoon-tamago.com/2013/05/28/tatsuo-horiuchi-exce...), that's cool even if other tools would give them more possibilities. But in this case, the 80s development style is neither part of the art, nor is it better in any way at all, so people keep pointing out that this decision is just objectively worse than doing the absolute minimum of modern version control.

ethbr0 5y ago
I get your point, but it's also not entirely accurate to say the workflow and tools aren't part of the art. Creativity is a fickle thing, and it's unlikely that steps X,Y,Z would produce the same inspiration as A,B,C. I agree that modern version control would offer benefits, but maybe in moving to git Tarn would decide to sha1 everything internally, which would have some ultimate impact on the game that results.
- viraptor 5y ago
  > not entirely accurate to say the workflow and tools aren't part of the art. That workflow/tools is not something they advertise, are proud of, or concentrate on. We know about it from a random interview only, so I don't see a reason to count that as part of the DF-as-art.
  - bashinator 5y ago
    I think you're talking about the artistic _product_, and the ethernet bridge is talking about artistic _process_. Like, you don't care what kind of paintbrush a painter uses, but it matters a lot to them.

em3rgent0rdr 5y ago

git blame so the developer can remember why they did something 15 years ago.

dudus 5y ago

He should care. The effort to learn git would have saved him time. Time he could have used to improve DF or to sleep, whatever. But instead he's still moving folders around. I believe it's a balance. You don't want to spend your life just adjusting your IDE settings to the point that you never work on your actual project. But you shouldn't completely neglect anything that could improve your life with little effort. I confess I'm guilty of "procrastination by configuration". I probably spent a year of my total career life just messing with my settings or getting the perfect git or vim configfiles.

tzs 5y ago
I think you may be overestimating the amount of time and effort it takes to move folders on a modern computer.
- technofiend 5y ago
  I don't disagree he needs a source code control system. But it's his intellectual property and right now he has some protection through redundancy. At least I certainly hope he keeps some USB sticks with a friend because if not one house fire and his livelyhood is gone. If he goes online he has to worry about someone hacking his account, if he keeps it at home we're back to what is his backup strategy, what does his redundancy model look like, and that's just not losing anything he already has. Next he needs to git's enough to be effective. Not that it's hard but if you've never used any sccm before it can be intimidating, and all of it takes time. It may just be easier to say later, later, later because you don't want to take however long it'll be to move and you're thinking of all the lost development time. Of course if he ever really needs it (house fire, tornado, hurricane) the price will the seem quite cheap. In the meantime I'd at least find a way to backup off-site even if it's scp'ing passworded zip files to an Azure VM.

lordnacho 5y ago

> But, who cares? If this worked for the developer, what's wrong? Chances are it didn't work for the developer. I've been in places where people were versioning by folder, and pretending it was fine, because they didn't want to learn how to do it properly. They'd come up will all manner of excuses that git/svn/hg/etc had already dealt with. "It's easier to just copy paste", "It's a waste of my time to spend time on a VCS", "What if we both change the same file". I've heard them all, and when I look back at the colleagues who said this, they produced a lot less than they ought to have. Not just because of version control, it's one among several software red flags (never commenting anything, not having tests, not making an effort to make things work on other people's machines, etc). I'm not going to say anything bad about the DF guy, this seems like a strange foible, but in general not using version control is a major red flag that someone is actually a bit of a novice who is low on productivity. Version control is the big one, because if you're productive you tend to write a lot of code, and you'll tend to have hit the same issues that everyone has when they're writing a lot of stuff.

capableweb 5y ago
> I'm not going to say anything bad about the DF guy, this seems like a strange foible, but in general not using version control is a major red flag that someone is actually a bit of a novice who is low on productivity. Sure, not using version control in an environment where collaboration is to be expected (like in teams/companies where you work with others), I'd agree with you. But that's not Dwarf Fortress, it's just a single person doing the work. Obviously Tarn is not "low on productivity" or "a bit of a novice" since he have done something many of us will never do in our entire life, create entertainment that will forever live in some peoples memories. Just because he's not using Git, doesn't mean it's a red flag, since using Git would basically give him zero benefits and just add more to learn for again, zero benefits.