Low-resource open source developers pretty much screwed now

[OpenFreeNet]

Sapling follow a "stack approach". You have polite commits, and "working" commits. You can fold and split working commits. Every operation is saved also in a private "operation log", so you have both a clean repo history, and low level details of every dirty operation you have done. You can revert anything. You can move working commits like in a stack. When you are happy, you push finished commits to a Git repo, and during review they can improve them. In practice the operation on the history of commits are more natural and composable.

In a Git repo you can have many branches with various experiments/features. In a Sapling repo usually you have a linear history of the already pushed/public commits on the bottom, and a tree of working commits on the top of the log. But this "chaos" of commits is fully visible, as a tree. You can continuosly move commits in this tree. When something become production-ready, you push the finished commits in the bottom part. In the top you have always working commits.

Every refinement you do with the commits is visible in the private repo with sl journal. So when you manage commits, you don't loose anything, if you do the wrong command.

 

[drhowarddrfine]

something of good there must be in the language

No language determines the value or usefulness of any app

 

[drhowarddrfine]

What's wrong with git?

Everyone started using it only because Linus invented it over a weekend to get rid of the version control system he was using then. No other reason. Just like my previous comment about Rust. There was better version control then and still now

 

[CShell]

With LLMs that changes. You either need a monthly subscription to an AI service (and the $20/month option doesn't reach very far), or you need hardware to run an LLM locally. You'd spend about $3500, which gets you either:

I disagree.

You don't need AI to be competitive as a computer programmer. In fact you had better know how to survive WITHOUT AI or your going to have a very rough time as a programmer. Programmers regularly get programming solutions from AI that do not work ... as in the AI provided solutions do not function at all, or within spec, or perform extremely badly. For a programmer "to know" if an AI solution is going to work or not... they literally have to know how to program without AI.

As for everything going up in price $$$$$ -- that was the entire point of AI to begin with.

You would have to be pretty naive to think an "AI PC" was going to be cheap . It's an "AI PC" -- it is "the Porsche of PCs", even though it is really not. No one can even explain in plain English "WHAT an AI PC actually is" - even today.

Color Montors? Dialup Modems? Internet? Neural Networks? Cloud? Crypto? Next "Valley buzz word"? - same thing. AI was always an excuse by (everyone) to raise prices.

Computer programmers were writing "AI" in the 1970s as the same time they invented the EMACS editor - what do you think the LISP and PROLOG programming languages were used for back then? AI isn't something "everyone suddenly discovered" in the year 202x ....

Heck we were running (Link Wikipedia: ELIZA) using the BASIC programming language during the 1980s (The original ELIZA was designed between 1964 - 1967) and we thought we had achieved the "REAL DEAL" AI back then ! Maybe ... we had?