
"Not Rocket Science": The story of Monotone and Bors - luu
http://graydon.livejournal.com/186550.html
======
pshc
Whoa, _Graydon Hoare_ wrote Monotone? Mind blown!

Huge blast of nostalgia: Back in the summer of 2006 when I was learning git
for the first time (and leaving svn in the process), there was all this
uncertainty in the community about which VCS was the best... a lot of people
weren't even sure that DVCS was a good idea at all! Even so, the Linux kernel
had been using git for a year at the time.

At the time there were git, and mercurial, bazaar, bitkeeper and its
controversies... and I distinctly remember reading about Monotone! I remember
reading how it was the inspiration for git's DAG. I was intrigued but sadly
never actually tried Monotone because I was already too blown away by learning
git.

It's funny. Git completely changed the way I thought about coding. Made me
really, _really_ realize the value of good data structures, and what a waste
of effort parsing is. As a direct result, I became obsessed with an idea in
late 2006--this idea of a truly next-generation programming environment. This
idea of a language+editor+VCS where the ASTs and entire edit history would be
stored in git's DAG. [1] So I worked on that for a while, but never really got
anywhere...

... and then in late 2012, along comes Rust, which fulfills the language part
of this language+editor+VCS trifecta in my mind. And Rust was a personal
project by Graydon! So I'm just realizing now that Graydon conceived not only
my ideal language, but also my ideal VCS! So that's why my mind's blown.

In short, Graydon is a prolific badass.

[1] It's really a very old idea of course; as old as Smalltalk. I think Steve
Yegge attempted it with his Grok Project. See also: Subtext, Lamdu, Projucer.
As for the future, Chris Granger and his team may very well pull it off with
Aurora.

~~~
fizzyfizz
You forgot the Berlin windowing and GUI system, back in the 90s. Rotatable
windows, alpha channels, super fast, and unlike X it was actually a GUI that
you could style and so on. Yeah, there was a lot about it that was impractical
for its time, but so was OS X.

Like you I discovered that Graydon was behind all these cool projects sort of
by accident. He seems to keep a low profile.

------
steveklabnik
Bors is one of my favourite parts about working on Rust.

Also, their "open source report card" is always hilarious:
[https://osrc.dfm.io/bors/](https://osrc.dfm.io/bors/)

------
haberman
Coincidence -- I wrote a G+ post not two months ago talking about this same
idea (what Graydon calls the "Not Rocket Science" principle). I was surprised
to find that (as Graydon says) there doesn't seem to be a lot of tool support
for this:
[https://plus.google.com/108917965951523281393/posts/6ERd4fha...](https://plus.google.com/108917965951523281393/posts/6ERd4fhaB51)

------
mtdewcmu
Just general commentary. If something really, truly works and you can prove
it, then everyone will adopt it. If this isn't being adopted by everyone then
there can only be two reasons: either it doesn't really, truly work -- because
of some nasty details that you're soft-pedaling; or it simply needs more
proof, which will inevitably come with time.

If it doesn't really, truly work, one reason could be that most corporate
developers can barely write working code; writing test code that will hold the
whole project up if/when it fails -- that's beyond what you could trust the
average developer to write.

It may work well when you have a top-notch developer to write tests, or when
the goals of the project are especially amenable to automated testing, but in
the common case cause too much friction.

Edit: a more sinister reason that automated testing isn't used more, even if
it might deliver better software, is that a lot of companies that are in the
software business don't care much about defects. Many seem to care more about
shipping features, even if those features are half-assed and buggy, than about
shipping code that works. But, even so -- we're talking about no-brainers
here. Even shoddy companies eventually adopt really obvious better practices,
even if only by following the herd.

~~~
kenko
"Just general commentary. If something really, truly works and you can prove
it, then everyone will adopt it."

This is charmingly naive.

~~~
haberman
Maybe so, but you would have a more convincing (counter-)argument if you
offered some counterexamples.

~~~
tbrownaw
To start with, anything covered by the
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem)
.

~~~
mtdewcmu
Technophiles have a tendency to fall in love with ideas that no one else cares
about and assert that people that dont see what they see are fools. But
capitalism enforces a degree of honesty. If you can put a cash value on the
productivity gain some idea will provide, and it's a significant sum, then
it's not much of a stretch to predict that it will prevail eventually. If the
idea has no significant cash value, then it's only a mediocre idea. Sometimes
we tech people have to be humble and accept that something we love is mediocre
(especially when we try to start a company based on the idea and no one buys
it).

