<story><title>Linus Torvalds: Git proved I could be more than a one-hit wonder</title><url>https://www.techrepublic.com/article/linus-torvalds-git-proved-i-could-be-more-than-a-one-hit-wonder/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cmarschner</author><text>To me the beauty of git stems from the fact that it is an implementation of a functional data structure. It‘s a tree index that is read-only, and updating it involves creating a complete copy of the tree and giving it a new name. Then the only challenge is to make that copy as cheap as possible - for which the tree lends itself, as only the nodes on the path to the root need to get updated. As a result, you get lock-free transactions (branches) and minimal overhead. And through git‘s pointer-to-parent commit you get full lineage.
It is so beautiful in fact that when I think about systems that need to maintain long-running state in concurrent environments, my first reaction is ”split up the state into files, and maintain it through git(hub)“.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>combatentropy</author><text>&amp;quot;. . . unlike every single horror I&amp;#x27;ve ever  witnessed when looking closer at SCM products, git actually has a simple design, with stable and reasonably well-documented data structures. In  fact, I&amp;#x27;m a huge proponent of designing your code around the data, rather than the other way around, and I think it&amp;#x27;s one of the reasons git has been fairly successful. . . .&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer  and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;--- Linus Torvalds, &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lwn.net&amp;#x2F;Articles&amp;#x2F;193245&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lwn.net&amp;#x2F;Articles&amp;#x2F;193245&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Linus Torvalds: Git proved I could be more than a one-hit wonder</title><url>https://www.techrepublic.com/article/linus-torvalds-git-proved-i-could-be-more-than-a-one-hit-wonder/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cmarschner</author><text>To me the beauty of git stems from the fact that it is an implementation of a functional data structure. It‘s a tree index that is read-only, and updating it involves creating a complete copy of the tree and giving it a new name. Then the only challenge is to make that copy as cheap as possible - for which the tree lends itself, as only the nodes on the path to the root need to get updated. As a result, you get lock-free transactions (branches) and minimal overhead. And through git‘s pointer-to-parent commit you get full lineage.
It is so beautiful in fact that when I think about systems that need to maintain long-running state in concurrent environments, my first reaction is ”split up the state into files, and maintain it through git(hub)“.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>duxup</author><text>I encountered a large company where they had a private git server for their engineering teams.&lt;p&gt;Over time someone discovered that the number of repositories and usage was much greater than they expected.   What they found was that non engineering folks who had contact with engineering had asked questions about how they manage their code, what branches were, and etc.  Some friendly engineering teams had explained, then some capable non engineering employees discovered that the server was open to anyone with a login (as far as creating and managing your own repositories) and capable employees had started using it to manage their own files.&lt;p&gt;The unexpected users mostly used it on a per user basis (not as a team) as the terminology tripped up &amp;#x2F; slowed down a lot of non engineering folks, but individuals really liked it.&lt;p&gt;IT panicked and wanted to lock it down but because engineering owned it ... they just didn&amp;#x27;t care &amp;#x2F; nothing was done.  They were a cool team.</text></comment>