3 ms·

Perhaps it was deliberate, but your last paragraph (plaintext vs db) really just reinforces your point of standards. There's nothing particularly special about

Perhaps it was deliberate, but your last paragraph (plaintext vs db) really just reinforces your point of standards. There's nothing particularly special about plaintext aside from its total ubiquity. Everything today uses and understands ASCII/UTF-8 and we've used that, plus some handy human conventions like limited character count between newline characters, to build up tools like git to help manage the changes in smaller chunks. There's nothing preventing us from doing the same for other formats if they become commonly supported or expected. Much like SQLite and some of the tools cropping up.

chme 4y ago
> There's nothing preventing us from doing the same for other formats if they become commonly supported or expected. Much like SQLite and some of the tools cropping up. True. I mean if it would be common to put source code and text into sqlite files, then most tools would probably also deal with it. However there is a case about simplicity. For instance writing a diff algorithm on plain text files is much simpler and easy to understand, than writing diff algorithms on text or binary structures.
- chmod775 4y ago
  > For instance writing a diff algorithm on plain text files is much simpler and easy to understand, than writing diff algorithms on text or binary structures. I'd argue the opposite. Coming up with a good, human readable, diff on unstructured text within acceptable runtime is not that easy. LCS is NP-hard and the naive algorithm has unacceptable performance and memory footprint. However diffing something structured, especially when it has unique keys like in most databases, is really easy. Structure gives you an easy way to compare data systematically and is handy to express differences.
forgotmypw17 4y ago
> There's nothing particularly special about plaintext aside from its total ubiquity. But ubiquity is extremely special and useful and essential if you want to maintain ownership of your data.

chme 4y ago

> There's nothing preventing us from doing the same for other formats if they become commonly supported or expected. Much like SQLite and some of the tools cropping up. True. I mean if it would be common to put source code and text into sqlite files, then most tools would probably also deal with it. However there is a case about simplicity. For instance writing a diff algorithm on plain text files is much simpler and easy to understand, than writing diff algorithms on text or binary structures.

chmod775 4y ago
> For instance writing a diff algorithm on plain text files is much simpler and easy to understand, than writing diff algorithms on text or binary structures. I'd argue the opposite. Coming up with a good, human readable, diff on unstructured text within acceptable runtime is not that easy. LCS is NP-hard and the naive algorithm has unacceptable performance and memory footprint. However diffing something structured, especially when it has unique keys like in most databases, is really easy. Structure gives you an easy way to compare data systematically and is handy to express differences.

forgotmypw17 4y ago

> There's nothing particularly special about plaintext aside from its total ubiquity. But ubiquity is extremely special and useful and essential if you want to maintain ownership of your data.