GavinMendelGleason / syntactic_versioning Public

Well, the title is deliberately provocative, but I genuinely mean it, and it's not wrong: Git does not work with programming languages. Instead it works with source files of text.

The fact that git works on lines of text has worked fantastically well - better than it has any right too. But is this as far as we can go?

I remember the bad old days of revision control. I used file based revision control on VMS. I've used CVS, subversion (svn), and visual source safe in development environments. The pain and torment these systems caused me has been quite successfully sublimated into my unconscious mind, only rising to the surface when I'm forced to think about the history of revision control.

Git is not without its pains - you'll find yourself knee deep in some horrendous merge or rebase at some point, confused how to get things working again. But there are so many benefits over what it was like in the past that these things are easily excused.

The fundamentally multi-master approach of git, combined with the concepts of CI/CD have yielded enormous benefits. They've actually made my life better.

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