On Anthropomorphizing Code

I haven’t read enough Heinlein to be sure that I like the guy, but he gets major brownie points for TANSTAAFL. jwz gets brownie points for several reasons, not the least of which is for having written, Linux is only free if your time has no value.

I try to avoid the mistake of saying that an inanimate object or non-corporeal hunk of information “needs” something, but I fail sometimes. For example, I said “I just think that ActiveRecord needs to support the low-level and middle-level abstractions better.” This is silly; of course, code doesn’t need anything per se.

You may think I’m being pedantic by saying this, but people commonly mix up whose needs are really being described. What I should have said was, “I would be happy with ActiveRecord if it supported…”, clearly indicating that the need was mine. I have a problem, and this code doesn’t solve it fully. And I understand that I, and maybe some like-minded individuals, bear the burden of actually trying to solve this problem. If I sit and wait and it gets fixed, that’s great, but it’s not fair for me to demand that the universe solve all my problems for me just because it has solved a few of them already without me doing any work.
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Thoughts about using Git for closed source projects

Git is getting a lot of press in the open source world lately, but hasn’t got much traction in the closed source corporate development world. There’s a reason for this, and it’s more than conservatism on the part of the corporate developers. Git (or any DVCS, really) embodies a development culture that isn’t very enterprise-y.
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Subversion 1.5 will include merge tracking

Despite Linus’ strident criticism of Subversion (in the 70 minute video he accuses Subversion, and then anybody who wrote it, and then anybody who likes it, of being ugly and stupid) I still use Subversion and I like it. Clearly compared to Linus I am ugly and stupid. OK fine. But I’m not switching to git now because my tiny teams have been fine with Subversion. Maybe later I’ll give git a whirl.
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