Development Multiverse

Jeff Atwood just put up a post, complete with a catchy analogy, that provides a good pedagogic overview of branching and merging. Many aspects of these concepts were discussed in the comments, most providing support for the perspective that Branching Is Hard(TM). My own perspective is that one of the chief reasons this is 'all very difficult' is because individual developers only have exposure to branching in the scope of the entire project and that exposure is most often very limited. In the absence of explicit personal experience with managing branching and merging I think it will always be Hard. Queue extolling the virtues of distributed version control...

Coming late to the dVCS party, I discovered Mercurial (Hg) a few months ago. A dVCS like Hg allows you to have full version control over your own work; the prime benefit in this context, you can easily play with different branching schemes. You find out very quickly just how many 'parallel universes' you can juggle, or at least I did (with great power comes great...blah blah blah). In this circumstance, the individual developer can acquire experience with the complete process of managing branching and merging, which will help them grok the activities within the greater project context perhaps making the process Easier(TM).

I think the discussion of version control in the general context of software engineering is an interesting one, for more discussion check out some threads on Reddit (can't find the bloody one I'm looking for right now, argh!), this essay by David Wheeler (of Secure Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO fame), and the Mercurial Book.

Positively Orwellian

A comment to a post on Eric Rescorla's blog reminded me about an important essay by George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, that is as appropriate now as when it was first written, maybe more.

I'm writing up a report for a client (right after I post this okay!), so I want to remember this:

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

Very important.