Comments on: version control: writers vs programmers http://nonstandarddeviation.com/2006/07/25/version-control-writers-vs-programmers/ they distracted us, so now we're distracting you Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:51:53 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 hourly 1 By: Andy Dent http://nonstandarddeviation.com/2006/07/25/version-control-writers-vs-programmers/#comment-76 Andy Dent Wed, 24 Jan 2007 20:46:23 +0000 http://nonstandarddeviation.com/2006/07/25/version-control-writers-vs-programmers/#comment-76 <p>I found the GroupEdit proposal very interesting, particularly as I work in a scientific organisation with colleagues who are involved in international standards refinement (XML-schemas such as GML and GeoSciML).</p> <p>Beyond a certain level of complexity, Word's change tracking and markup becomes unwieldy, as well as the instability you mention. I have my own horror memory of being stupid enough to try pasting about 20 Visio diagrams into an architecture document in Word.</p> <p>I'm not convinced about your argument that the natural object of interest is different for writers and programmers and I don't actually believe that the line-orientation of Subversion is particularly good. We have gone a long way backwards compared to the method-oriented editors of Smalltalk and the classic ObjectMaster environment for C++ et al, about which I blogged nostalgically last year.</p> <p><a href="http://www.artima.com/forums/flat.jsp?forum=106&thread=158259" rel="nofollow">http://www.artima.com/forums/flat.jsp?forum=106&thread=158259</a></p> <p>I think that there is a larger "text chunk" which seems relevant to the GroupEdit discussion and would be analogous to methods in an OO language. If anything, the GroupEdit proposal highlights how silly it is that most of our tools are still line-oriented.</p> I found the GroupEdit proposal very interesting, particularly as I work in a scientific organisation with colleagues who are involved in international standards refinement (XML-schemas such as GML and GeoSciML).

Beyond a certain level of complexity, Word’s change tracking and markup becomes unwieldy, as well as the instability you mention. I have my own horror memory of being stupid enough to try pasting about 20 Visio diagrams into an architecture document in Word.

I’m not convinced about your argument that the natural object of interest is different for writers and programmers and I don’t actually believe that the line-orientation of Subversion is particularly good. We have gone a long way backwards compared to the method-oriented editors of Smalltalk and the classic ObjectMaster environment for C++ et al, about which I blogged nostalgically last year.

http://www.artima.com/forums/flat.jsp?forum=106&thread=158259

I think that there is a larger “text chunk” which seems relevant to the GroupEdit discussion and would be analogous to methods in an OO language. If anything, the GroupEdit proposal highlights how silly it is that most of our tools are still line-oriented.

]]>