Emacs discusses web-based development workflows

Posted Sep 2, 2021 9:08 UTC (Thu) by anton (subscriber, #25547)
Parent article: Emacs discusses web-based development workflows

To the extent that the future can be predicted with any accuracy, at this point one would have to guess that 20—or 30—years from now email-based workflows will be dead or nearly so.

This kind of prediction has been made often. Sometimes it has turned out to be true, often not. I remember that we all should switch from cvs to svn, because it's the future (and then arch and then bzr). Or, in hardware design, maybe 20 years ago Verilog was supposed to have no future, because VHDL would be taking over. Some decades later svn, arch, and bzr are at least as marginal as cvs, and Verilog dominates over VHDL (at least for large projects). Concerning "forges", Sourceforge, from which the name is derived, is marginal, while email is still used widely.

It seems to me that if you change to follow the latest trend, that trend has a good chance to turn out to be a fad. You will then have to follow the next trend, imposing repeated strain on your main developers. Admittedly, there are changes that stick for a longer period (RCS->CVS, CVS->git), but it tends to be hard to predict whether some tool will be stable or will soon be superseeded by the next great thing, or become unattractive for some other reason (e.g., being bought by a big corporation with a dubious reputation).

Emacs discusses web-based development workflows

Posted Sep 2, 2021 9:57 UTC (Thu) by mfuzzey (subscriber, #57966) [Link] (2 responses)

svn was released in 2000 and was a significant improvement over cvs which had been around since 1986 (and widely distributed since 1990)
git then came along in 2005 but I think it took a few years before it was widely known and used outside of the Linux kernel community.

Of course git changes the paradigm and offers a huge advantage over svn but I donr't think that means people in the early 2000s should have stuck to cvs just because something better could possibly come along later. If you wait long enough something better will always come along, the question is how much better is the new tool than the current tool and how much disruption will changing cause.

As to VHDL/Verilog that seems to be a geographical thing Verilog may dominate in the US but not in Europe. This is probably because Europe was later to the party so adopted the newer language whereas the US had already heavilly invested in Verilog and VHDL wasn't enough of an improvement to justify switching for many US companies.

Emacs discusses web-based development workflows

Posted Sep 2, 2021 10:28 UTC (Thu) by geert (subscriber, #98403) [Link]

My personal timeline looks slightly different: between cvs and git, there was bk.
I only got exposed to svn (work moved from clearcase to svn) when I was already using git, so that felt backwards. Fortunately I never really had to use svn, as git-svn came to the rescue.

Emacs discusses web-based development workflows

Posted Sep 2, 2021 11:20 UTC (Thu) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link]

If svn was a significant improvement over cvs for you, that was a good reason to change. OTOH, it would not have been for us, and we would only have done it because it was the thing to do at the time. And that's not a sufficient reason to do it, because the change has a significant cost to the existing maintainers. And likewise, just because putting the project on the forge of the year is the thing to do this year is not a sufficient reason to change an existing project in this way.

Concerning Verilog/VHDL, my understanding (based on the possibly biased HOPL-IV presentation on Verilog) is that at one point (maybe around 2000) VHDL was so fashionable that the Verilog people were believing themselves that they were on a sinking ship. However, Verilog was designed to be efficiently simulated, and VHDL was designed for other goals, and for large projects simulation speed is king, so VHDL could not win in large projects, and so failed to conquer the world, and eventually could not maintain the cachet of being the inevitable future.

Emacs discusses web-based development workflows

Posted Sep 3, 2021 2:31 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

> It seems to me that if you change to follow the latest trend, that trend has a good chance to turn out to be a fad.
Github has existed since 2008, that's almost 14 years. It's quite clear that this model of development is not going away.

Emacs discusses web-based development workflows

Posted Sep 3, 2021 6:38 UTC (Fri) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

GitHub is so old, other forge sites are often simply described as "like GitHub but better/different/[other adjective]" or as "like GitHub for [noun]." The notion that it's a passing fad would be hilarious, if people did not actually believe it.

Emacs discusses web-based development workflows

Posted Sep 3, 2021 13:53 UTC (Fri) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link]

Is github even in the running for the Emacs forge? My impression is that it is not.

Sourceforge has been around since 1999, but at some point (probably when github ate its lunch) it turned ugly.

If some other forge becomes more popular than github, how will github react? I expect that they will become much more focussed on monetizing their existing user base, in whatever ways they can get away with. And many users won't be pleased.

Emacs discusses web-based development workflows

Posted Sep 3, 2021 17:19 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> . Concerning "forges", Sourceforge, from which the name is derived, is marginal, while email is still used widely.

Sourceforge is dead but forges are absolutely everywhere. Sourceforge is to forges what BitKeeper is to source control: the revolutionary pioneer that showed the way.

The keyword that everyone seems to miss is INTEGRATION = having a single database where everything is automatically connected to everything else: bugs, patches, commits, comments and of course the ability to make a typo-fix and many other things with just a few keyboard shortcuts.

Integration, not "web-based". Integration as in "do anything in fewer actions". Like getting notified only by some specific code reviews/discussions. Another comment mentioned the ability to open VS Code from github with a single keystroke.

There are of course some other very valid concerns with forges: software freedom, backward compatibility with the email interface and all the home-grown automation developed on top of it, having some deliberate hurdles to push back noisy noobs,... but it's amazing to see how strong emotions and attachment to email can get the better of otherwise very smart people and get them to write ignorant comments like "There is no way to objectively determine which development style is easier". Of course integration makes things faster and easier, that's the entire purpose of it. Otherwise why would people use INTEGRATED Development Environments like... Emacs!! The irony.

Another very ironic thing is the existence of multiple Emacs packages to interact with forges without a web browser. Hard-code Emacs developers probably don't even know these packages exist because "software freedom", "copyright assignment", and last but not least "employer disclaimer" = the biggest hurdle for drive-by contributions IMHO.