bignose

Except worse: Confluence tries insanely hard to prevent anyone actually getting at the document source code. So you are expected to use the godawful interactive web editor to make any changes.

Despite their great value to society, open source projects are frequently understaffed and underresourced. That’s why GitHub has been advocating for a stronger focus on supporting, rather than regulating, open source projects.

What nice sentiments. Perhaps you, GitHub, could start by insisting that Microsoft cease the un-attributed, non-consensual shovelling of open-source software into their LLM training maw. And turn off the LLM that they're attempting to unilaterally sell based on all that uncompensated labour.

Or is your platitude of “supporting open source projects” fall short of actually respecting what we want and need?

a marketing term that is used to sprinkle some magic fairy dust that brings the venture capital dollars.

Like “metaverse” before it. And “blockchain” before that.

Whatever magic phrase will unlock the purse strings of those who control the money, know nothing about where to invest it, and expect unreasonable monopoly returns.

Personally, I’m a Luddite and think the new tools should be deployed by the people’s livelihood it will effect and not the business owners.

Thank you for correctly describing what a Luddite wants and does not want.

As others have said: the content is likely to be only of historical interest, because the fields they describe have progressed in understanding a great deal in the intervening decades. As a result, many, many historical books are of effectively negligible interest today.

With that said, historical interest can sometimes be a lot: and those two seem to be from institutions which did seminal work (Rand Corporation, for example).

This is a good question: submitting a bug report should be feasible without maintaining an account at GitHub (other issue trackers manage it just fine with only existing email communication, for example).

Unfortunately, GitHub, like so many other centralised platforms that assume they're the centre of the world, expects you to create and maintain a personal identity special to GitHub, in order to submit a bug report at all.

Following up after your clarification (thank you):

it is not okay to do, but the severity of how much of an issue it is depends on the context? Either that or it’s completely avoidable in the first place if I just use “automated testing” or “loggers”.

It's important here to distinguish the code you're currently working on, in your local development environment only; versus the code you commit to VCS (or otherwise record for progress / deployment / sharing with others / etc.).

In your local development environment, frequently you are making exploratory changes, and you don't yet know what exactly is the behaviour you need to implement. In this mode, it's normal to pepper the area of interest with console.log("data_record is:", data_record) calls, and other chatty diagnostic messages. They are quick and easy to write, and give immediate result for your exploratory needs.

In the code you commit (or deploy, or share, or otherwise record as "this is what I think the code should be, for now") you do not want that chatty, exploratory, effectively just noise diagnostics. Remove them as part of cleaning up the code, which you will do before leaving your workstation because you now understand what the diagnostic messages were there to tell you.

If you find that you haven't yet understood the code, can't yet clean it up, but you need to leave your workstation? Then you've made a mistake of estimation: your exploration took too long and you didn't achieve a result. Clean up anyway, leave the code in a working state, come back to it another day with a fresh mind. Your will have a better understanding because of the exploration you did anyway.

Magit, which is the best Git porcelain around. Git, because it has an unparalleled free-software ecosystem of developer tools that work with it.

Why is Git's free-software ecosystem so much better than all the other VCSen?

Largely because of marketing (the maker of Linux made this! hey look, GitHub!), but also because it has a solid internal data model that quickly proved to experts that it is fast and flexible and reliable.

Git's command-line interface is atrocious compared to contemporary DVCSen. This was seen originally as no problem because Git developers intentionally released it as the “plumbing” for a VCS, intending that other motivated projects would create various VCS “porcelain” for various user audiences. https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Plumbing-and-Porcelain The interface with sensible operations and coherent interface language, resides in that “porcelain”, which the Git developers explicitly said they were not focussed on creating.

But, of course, the “plumbing” command line interface itself immediately became the primary way people were told to use Git, and the “porcelain” applications had much slower development and nowhere near the universal recognition of Git. So either people didn't learn Git (learning only a couple of operations in a web app, for example), or to learn Git they were required to use the dreadful user-hostile default “plumbing” commands. It became cemented as the primary way to learn Git for many years.

I was a holdout with Bazaar VCS for quite a while, because its command-line interface dealt in coherent user-facing language and consistent commands and options. It was deliberately designed to first have a good command-line UI, and make a solid DVCS under that. Which it did, quite well; but it was no match for the market forces behind Git.

Well, eventually I found that Magit is the best porcelain for Git, and now I have my favourite VCS.

The Unix shell remains an excellent IDE.

A huge array of text- and data-manipulation tools, with more available through the standard package manager in my operating system.

Add in a powerful text editor like Vim or Emacs, and nothing can beat this IDE.