I haven't seen anybody mentioning it or even noticing it, like it's just the water we swim in now, but this month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of what would become a seminal, and is arguably the single most important, piece of social software ever created.
Written by Douglas McIlroy and James Hunt and released with the 5th Edition of Unix this month in 1974: diff.
https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V5/usr/source/s1/diff1.c
My friend @gvwilson has argued, and I am absolutely ready to believe, that you can divide the entire computational universe into "has diff and patch or doesn't", and that people living without it don't even have the language to recognize how bad they've got it, how many opportunities to share and collaborate have been silently denied them.
Word processors, spreadsheets, slides? "Track changes" is _trash_ by comparison. No programmer would consent to live the way we make office workers live.
@timbray @irvingreid @gvwilson @mhoye Thanks, Tim. Yes, it's all Word, which became lots of (not) fun c.2016 when older versions produced documents that infected others with bad formatting. Manual retyping was the only fix
On top of Word, there are unbelievably expensive plugins for Adobe Acrobat Pro for legal PDF management. They like their pages.
(let's hope no-one gets billed $300 / 15 minutes of senior partner time for lawyers learning the never-fit-for-purpose git)
@timbray @irvingreid @gvwilson @mhoye @scruss
PDFs (of Word documents) is the way they are bundled and transmitted between firms, courts etc. This has its own costs because, especially if they are being disclosed, redactions have to be in PDFs and that's a terrible process.
mhoye
Stewart Russell
Greg Wilson
Mark Levison
Irving Reid
Tim Bray 🇨🇦
cholling
Simon Lucy