Comment by skinfaxi
19 hours ago
Ever try editing like, a Google Doc, while multiple people are in it? It's not fun. I can't imagine how that would go when people could be changing functions I'm referencing, etc. Isn't this was version control is for?
Works well if you're communicating while you're making changes in code.
At my work 20 people are changing the same wiki-page when we do heavy regression tests. Works like a charm (not everyone is writing at the same place in the document since we are testing different things and writing results at different sections).
> Ever try editing like, a Google Doc, while multiple people are in it? It's not fun
Uh yeah, it works amazingly well. I've done entire uni projects with Google Docs and it went great, and was much more convenient than whatever we did before using Google Docs
Honest question: with multiple contributors or just a single individual editor? I’m building a word processor and never personally considered multi-player useful.
Multiple. Just writing down some stuff and comments at the same time you're writing the content is very powerful. For group projects it was the fastest way we found to get to a working plan as soon as possible and get to work on assigned parts of the doc. It's also nice seeing other people working at the same time as yourself
I've seen it done: group project where due to delays everyone needed to blitz through writing the report, four people hammering out stuff in a shared google doc. It works pretty damn well. You probably want to be in the same room or on a voice call with the others, though.
Don't tell me what's fun or not! Some people might not like the experience, but why yuck someone's yum? Editing a Google doc at the same time as someone else when you're both in the flow and you know what you're doing and you know the person or persons really well, is sublime. Like a shared game of Factorio.
> Like a shared game of Factorio.
Which is another thing that just does not compute in my mind as a concept, much like pair programming. Probably for the same reasons. That said, it's obviously very situational and personality-dependent.
Pair programming requires a lot from you and your relationship with your pair programming partner.
When it's working I think it's absolutely great. Together we find the best solution in the fastest time with less errors along the way. I'm also less sloppy and more focused when someone constantly sees my work and vice versa. At the end of the day you can celebrate what you've done, both feel responsible for the work and knows exactly how it works.
If you look at one of the studio sessions between Drake and 40 (look up "100gigs" on youtube), there's this flow between the two, almost like an implicit language that they invented together, that lets them collaborate at an insane speed.
The problem is you need to fully trust your collaborators, and that's really hard to find in this industry. Most people never find it. I haven't.
I've seen it though. It exists. Very rare. I know two guys who used to participate in Ludum Dare over 10 years ago who would have loved something like Zed if it existed back then.
By contrast, at your 9-5 where you don't know if your coworker is gonna stab you in the back for a promotion (which I suspect is most people in the comments here) then Zed is probably not a great tool. Git would be a better fit for that. After all it was made to develop Linux, which is one of the lowest-trust collaborative environments out there.
For me it's less about trust and more about practicality. If you are coordinating live in person while collaborating that is a bit different than trying to edit a doc multiple people are in, all remotely. When I had said it's not fun that's the case I had in mind.
Linus actually mostly deals only with trusted subsystem leads. They may choose to deal with less trusted contributors, but I wouldn't say the Linux kernel development process is low trust. Many of those folks have worked together for decades.