Comment by oever
5 years ago
Version control is collaborative editing. Synchronizing on every key stroke is real-time collaborative editing. That's nice if you're working on a overlapping data at the same time. In code this does not happen so often because code repositories tend to be large.
Git does not work well for text because we have not figured out a nice format for text yet that developers and other people both enjoy. Developers want to stick to plain text as their format because we have so far failed to create nice tools and formats for structured data. Perhaps these affordances can appear thanks to a popularization of real-time collaborative editing.
Nobody is using "collaborative editing" to mean the sort of thing we've been doing with source control for decades, even if the plain English meaning of the component words seems like it might match that. We wouldn't have needed a new category term if "collaborative editing" didn't have the new element of real-time sharing.
The most common way in word processing to do collaborative editing is with 'track changes'. That has has quite a bit in common with version control and pull requests. There are different forms to do collaborative editing, real-time or asynchronous.
> Nobody
I count five or six people, including the author, in your 'nobody'.
If you watch any of the videos on CRDT, live editing (real-time) is every bit as much a corner case as the 'play by mail' scenario that code repositories do.
Asynchronous communications complicate Last Writer Wins algorithms, because the network is partitioned and time stamps don't have the same predictive value. Git is DVCS, where the "D" really means partition-resilience.
I'm not sure the distinction is as clear as you are making out.
Eclipse used to (?) have a feature where each local save was stored separately, so it was trivial to view local history.
I've done remote code reviews with shared documents.
I can certainly imagine a system that combines the two of these things into a single system where real time version control was integrated into a multi-user system.