Story: Software That Doesn't Suck With Jim Blandy

CoRecursive: Coding Stories

Building Subversion

Software is just the tool and it should get out of your way. In this episode, we will discuss Jim Blandy’s insights on how to build and recognize improvements for a great developer tool and find out how he approached the question: “What's the worst software that you use every day?”

“Everybody likes imaginary code because imaginary code is always perfect.” -Jim Blandy

“You don't want to maximize engagement with your version control system. You just want it to do its job and get out of the way. And so basically if somebody says, you know, this doesn't suck. That's actually pretty much exactly the right thing.” - Jim Blandy

“If you're making a series of small incremental changes to a large data structure, then the way that the persistent data structures are trying really hard to share as much data as possible really works in your favor.” -Jim Blandy

Episode Page

Episode Transcript

Links:

• Subversion
• Jim's Email
• Mercurial
• GNU Emacs