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My question would be along the lines of Alan Kay: is it really complex or did we just make it complicated?

taeric 11y ago
My take would be that there are complications from the myriad reasons these related tasks may be taken. It is possible to have a general purpose tool that works in all cases. It may not be the best performer in all cases, though. Hence, my joke on knives. My question back, do we have evidence that it is us making it complicated?
- nulltype 11y ago
  I think the things we want to conceptually do at least with code are not that complex, but the tools we have are. I don't know how to prove that without actually building better tools. One example might be that sync is a complex problem, but Dropbox does a pretty good job of creating a simple tool to manage it. So even if source control is inherently complex, perhaps the tools to manage it do not have to be. To continue with your utensil example, perhaps we should have one version control system for games, another for individuals and another for small teams rather than trying to make one tool do all those things.
  - taeric 11y ago
    It should be remembered that synchronization among yourself is actually not the source of many (if any) troubles. So, you say that Dropbox makes this easy, but only in the case where there is an understanding that only one person is making edits at a time. As that is the most common case. You put something in a folder for others to look at. Or in a folder so that you can access it somewhere else. Contrasted with highly collaborative editing where many users are concurrently making changes and want to find a way to present them. Git provides tools not only to manage these combinations and operations, but to reason about and display them. So, with my knife analogy, using a fillet knife is ridiculously useful if that is what you need. Likely to cause frustration if it is not. And training will help.

My take would be that there are complications from the myriad reasons these related tasks may be taken. It is possible to have a general purpose tool that works in all cases. It may not be the best performer in all cases, though. Hence, my joke on knives. My question back, do we have evidence that it is us making it complicated?

nulltype 11y ago
I think the things we want to conceptually do at least with code are not that complex, but the tools we have are. I don't know how to prove that without actually building better tools. One example might be that sync is a complex problem, but Dropbox does a pretty good job of creating a simple tool to manage it. So even if source control is inherently complex, perhaps the tools to manage it do not have to be. To continue with your utensil example, perhaps we should have one version control system for games, another for individuals and another for small teams rather than trying to make one tool do all those things.
- taeric 11y ago
  It should be remembered that synchronization among yourself is actually not the source of many (if any) troubles. So, you say that Dropbox makes this easy, but only in the case where there is an understanding that only one person is making edits at a time. As that is the most common case. You put something in a folder for others to look at. Or in a folder so that you can access it somewhere else. Contrasted with highly collaborative editing where many users are concurrently making changes and want to find a way to present them. Git provides tools not only to manage these combinations and operations, but to reason about and display them. So, with my knife analogy, using a fillet knife is ridiculously useful if that is what you need. Likely to cause frustration if it is not. And training will help.