[nonines]

It's the Cambrian explosion in SW Dev tools. What amazes me though is how undead everything is. It seems that even ancient stuff is still somewhere out there waiting to be maintained. And there's a gazillion more every year adding to the pile.

[smitty1e]

Except revision control.

Would that a git for build tools would come along.

That is, something so compelling and sufficiently licensed that it quells the discussion in a jiffy so that the focus can be on getting work done.

[pydry]

There's something of a paradox to build tools - people like to have one in "their" language, but most languages are ill suited for it. Half of the people need something really simple. The other half need something extremely complicated. There's a mountain of edge cases, most of which people don't even notice, but which make other people's lives a misery.

For git, I felt kind of sad that "linus branding" helped it to beat out mercurial. git's UI is kind of monstrous (even linus admitted that). It's one of those rare technologies where a bad UI is branded as "you're just not smart enough to understand it".

[smitty1e]

To that point, the bun fight moved from the back end to the UI when git came along.

Personally, if you're not using magit[1], you should have a look.

Ridiculously powerful; check. Open source; check. Works like a champ in a terminal over SSH; check, check, check.

[1] https://magit.vc/

[lerax]

Magit is great! I use everyday. The more useful feature for me is partial staging by simple text selection. Help so much to create better atomic commits

[nfin]

probably so many things are undead because we don’t need to /can’t litteraly eat slow/bad designed SW to survive as the analogy in the nature out there