Developers, developers, developers, developers.
Bill Gates is a very rich man today... and do you want to know why? The answer is one word: versions.
My list of basic tools is a partial answer to the question about what has changed: Over the past few years, large numbers of programmers have come to depend on elaborate tools to interface code with systems facilities.
The Mozilla project is big in terms of lines of code and complexity.
When I first got into technology I didn't really understand what open source was. Once I started writing software, I realized how important this would be.
Prolific programmers contribute to certain disaster.
I mean, source code in files; how quaint, how seventies!
When I write a script, I have all the old versions of the script on my laptop. They're saved as backups in case something goes horribly wrong.
A new release of Plan 9 happened in June, and at about the same time a new release of the Inferno system, which began here, was announced by Vita Nuova.
I'd make people say 'use Fork;' if I thought I could get away with it.
At the end of April I archived 'Curses' and Inform, and announced them on the newsgroups.
In true open source development, there's lots of visibility all the way through the development process.
We have a rule that if you check in code, you have to maintain it. So I mostly code on the side. I don't check in code anymore.
The beauty of open-source is that you can pick up right where someone left off and start right there.
Developers, developers, developers...
The World Wide Web is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT. We long ago foresaw the problems of one-way links, links that break (no guaranteed long-term publishing), no way to publish comments, no version management, no rights management.
In programming when you're making a change you have to know all the affected places, and you have to be able to model in your head what the performance impact will be.
As you get to the end of the project you want to run all the tests cases against one version and make sure that you know that that version passed everything. And so as you get late in the project you get a little more conservative about making radical changes to the software.
I really never wanted to do source control management at all and felt that it was just about the least interesting thing in the computing world .
Many people think that open source projects are sort of chaotic and and anarchistic. They think that developers randomly throw code at the code base and see what sticks.
The reason I use ed is that I don't want to lose what's on the screen.
I wrote a play once called 'Lobby Hero,' which I thought turned out very well, but there's no final version of it. I published the one we produced, but there are seven other versions with different variations sitting in my desk at home.
I often can't remember which scenes are and aren't in the final product, because I saw so many different versions of the Lemony Snicket that I forget which ended up on the cutting-room floor.
After releasing Mono 1.0, we started work on a new edition of Mono that will be released later in the year.
Generally, the best way to learn git is probably to first only do very basic things and not even look at some of the things you can do until you are familiar and confident about the basics.
