The Internal Combustion Engine is here to stay. Due to the efforts of generations of engineers, it is acceptably quiet, reasonably safe and only moderately polluting.
I’m sure any sensible visitor to Earth would say, “You crazy humans! Abandon mediocrity! Lay hold of excellence! Work together and you can have silent, safe and clean hydrogen fuel cells in just ten years!”
But this is not going to happen, because the infernal combustion engine is good enough. We are used to it. Mechanics are trained in its care and maintenance. We have a huge fuel distribution network. Hydrogen fuel cells are competing not only with the petrol engine, but also with the infrastructure and culture behind it.
Storing source code in disk-based text files is also here to stay, and programmers are bound to their text files as tightly as society at large is bound to their petrol cars.
It’s not as if there is a lack of options. In a recent post, Chris Petrelli holds forth Smalltalk and Zope as examples of programming systems that don’t need text files. This paper by Roedy Green explores what could be achieved if we gave up text based source files. Others have been experimenting for years.
The problem with text files, as with petrol engines, is that they are good enough. We are used to text files. We are trained to work with text files. All our IDEs, OSes and version control systems are geared to text files. Any other system for storing and manipulating source is competing with computing’s technological and cultural heritage.
The internal combustion engine was invented in 1860. In 2004 it’s still going strong. Programmers have been putting source into disk based text files since 1960. It’s only fair to assume we’ll still be doing it in 2104.
Comments
Good enough is only good enough if you can turn a blind eye to possible improvements. I am with the aliens (people have been telling me that for years).
Well, I was going to write something here, but it got really long, so I turned it into a post on my weblog instead.
But I will add this: My weblog also runs as a set of text files in hierarchical directories, which makes it very, very easy to add or delete posts, and hasn't suffered from any data corruption yet. ;)