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- | ====== Some Needed Clarification ====== | ||
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- | Now, before continuing the discussion of // | ||
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- | But, the issue nonetheless is one of balance. Suppose you were a journalist assigned to write some articles on the military. It turns out that every " | ||
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- | Would that not be completely surreal? How much expertise in military affairs would it take for you to realize that there is something very screwy going on? Of course, we could also imagine a situation where the journalist realizes all this but keeps it to himself, since he realizes that honestly reporting on this absurd state of affairs might be career suicide. | ||
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- | Now that I brought up a military metaphor, it occurs to me to point out that the stance of the people in a // | ||
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- | So, actually, a person' | ||
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- | However, the odd thing about this is that software is not a physical machine. If your code is stored in a code repository such as Git, SVN, or CVS, you can restore it effortlessly to any previous state it was in. So, actually, tinkering with the code is a no-lose situation. I recall on a mailing list hosted by Apache Software Foundation, one of the people there was making some comparison between allowing people to commit code and trusting your fellow mountain climbers. (The guy's hobby was rock climbing or something.) | ||
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- | I pointed out to him that the simile would be more applicable if, when you fell off a cliff at time t, and presumably broke all the bones your body, you had the capability of instantly restoring yourself to the state you were in at t-1 just before the fall. | ||
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- | It is really quite a stretch to liken mucking with source code to a physically dangerous activity like rock climbing. No matter how irreparably you mess up the code, you can always restore it to the previous state anyway. Of course, even if that were not the case, it still would not be comparable to falling off a cliff to one's death! So this is another striking example of an argument that is multiple degrees away from making any sense at all! | ||
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- | This leads us to another frequent symptom of // | ||
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- | //The insiders in a nothingburger project frequently **affect** that they don't understand how version control systems work.// | ||
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- | The // | ||
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- | If you are foolish (or masochistic) enough to be engaging these people in discussion and you point out the above, the typical result is that they simply walk away from the conversation. | ||
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- | that they would be terrified of actually taking apart any of these remaining machines that still work and trying to do any basic maintenance. Actually, their fear could be quite justified. Since they don't know how the machines work, they (quite rightfully) fear that if they dismantle the machine, they will never be able to re-assemble it into working condition. | ||
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