GitHub developer Scott Chacon on the question "SVN or Git?"
SVN. I’m a huge fan of slow development, waiting twenty minutes for commands to run, useless merge functionality and single points of failure. Why would anyone want cheap branching and easy merging when you can bill 5 hours for each merge instead? Those Git people are just crazy. If my commits took 1/10 of a second instead of 5 minutes, when would I ever find the time to read Hacker News?
Full interview. Especially poignant (to me) this week as I get to hit the repo via crappy residential broadband and crappy enterprise vpn.
My fears of impending IE6 responsibilities have lessoned ever so slightly. However, this does little to alleviate the two main holdouts for IE6:
- Conservative (i.e., lazy and/or incompetent) IT groups.
- Folks for whom nuanced browsing experience just doesn't matter (e.g., my mom).
Much like legalizing gay marriage, the best weapon in this fight remains time itself.
Seth Godin posts:
The people who make desktop software are making themselves obsolete. When you start developing on the web, your default is to be smart, to interact and to be open (with other software and with your users). Desktop software (like Word) is insanely unaware of what I do, why I do it and who I do it with. Right now, the desktop folks have the momentum of the incumbent. Not for long. Time to hurry.
I was going to write something with more vitriol, but now I feel that this quote is mostly sufficient. I will say that I'm tired of "technology" press treating Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the mainstream web as the only software worth developing.
(In fairness, pop-tech media occasionally covers wizzy multitouch demos and OS X minor version releases.)
In the age of rapid cycles and connected data, how long are we going to have to settle for dumb software?
In the age of technology blowhards and armchair developers, how long are we going to have to settle for this kind of empty reasoning?