[quietbritishjim]

In fairness, the rate of change of any type of tool slows down over time as the problem domain becomes well understood.

It's like the Joel on Software article (which annoyingly I can't find at the moment) about how software is always pretty much done by about version 4. His example was office software, especially Excel, and sure enough if you loaded Excel 4 today you'd see it does fundamentally all the main things.

I suspect we'll see git last at least double the length of time as those other VCS tools.

[eru]

I think mostly it will depend on what we will call the replacement to git. We might end up calling it 'git', too.

Less weirdly: ethernet has been replaced a few times already, but they always just end up branding the replacement as a new version of 'ethernet'.

[sanderjd]

I think this is a great point! What even is "git"? If it's the binary program named "git", then there are already lots of replacements for that binary that people use, and it would not be surprising at all if one of those different frontends becomes more dominant than "git" itself.

But if "git" is the protocol, the specification of how a particular construction of a database of versions, then I suspect that will be pretty sticky. I'm sure it isn't the optimal solution but it works well and it's very useful to have a lingua franca for this.

[londons_explore]

Old versions of the git binary are incompatible with new versions.

I suspect everything about git is the ship of Theseus

[bombcar]

Many of those variations of ethernet remain compatible, 10g switches can often negotiate down to 10/100.

[eru]

Yes. And the replacement to git might also stay compatible.

(In an extreme case, git can talk svn via git-svn. In a weird alternative history, you could imagine git being treated as a new version of svn; but apart from the names, nothing much else would change compared to our universe.)

[yardie]

I’ve worked with many switches. I have not encountered a 10g switch that will negotiate to 10m. 100m is not automatic in most cases. These very old protocols are very different from modern 10g-100g. So much so that the transceivers may need to load a completely different firmware to even understand it.

[bombcar]

100g may be too high, but my micro tick does fine: https://mikrotik.com/product/s_rj10

(I’ve not seen 100g over copper, but 10g is doable)

I don’t know if it will go down to half duplex.

[yardie]

Ok. Most of my experience the switches will have 2 modes for each port: 1G/2.5G/10G/25G/100G or 10M/100M/1G/2.5G. This is typical for datacenter switches. Found this out when my trusty 10/100M USB dongle couldn't establish link. I needed to upgrade to a 1G USB3 dongle.

[bombcar]

Now I want a datacenter switch with a gearshift for speeds, "high", "low" and "turbo" perhaps.

[toast0]

Half duplex is in spec at 100 as well as 10, so I'd be surprised if it didn't.

[Shawnj2]

I do think that if there is a replacement to git in the future, it will probably have pull requests, tags, etc. built in that most git servers support but implement separately since they’re not in the standard. Alternatively, GitHub as a platform will become so standardized that they may launch their own “VCS” which is just other things bolted onto git that only work with GitHub (we’re already going there with the git command line)

[account42]

What? Tags are built into git. Maybe you're thinking of releases aka attaching additional files to tags.

[tentacleuno]

They already have the GitHub command line, actually.

https://cli.github.com/

[Shawnj2]

Typo that’s what I meant

[paulddraper]

> software is always pretty much done by about version 4

IPv4 has entered the chat

[rvba]

Excel has recently introduced 4-5 VERY big changes:

* javascript (arguably 'nobody' knows how to use it though, looking at the scarce resources)

* Lambdas

* Sharepoint integration, which is a type of shared notebook - and arguably this has ruined excel usability completely, since linking one file to another is basically unusable, what means were are back to the stone age, where people fucking copy paste things between files (omg)

* PowerQuery (this is not new, but seems to be the way to "fix" the problem that sharepoint files that can be edited by multiple uses are basically unusable junk)

* Updated PivotTable model that allows some basic connections between tables (this all could have been done in multiple other ways before)

For me the problem is that with the "multiplayer Excel" that seems to be promoted by Microsoft (shared workbooks on sharepoint, where multiple users can edit them at the same time), Excel lost the main functionality for actual power users, who take data from multiple source files and then consolidate them to one final report. Of course this is still "possible", but not as easy as it was before with shared drives.

I see like multiple major regressions at Microsoft that harm "average" office worker productivity now:

1) Excel file linkages broken (as described above)

2) Outlook calendar app on android -> lack of ability to have a custom notification sound (e.g. a 30 second sound), so you can skip fucking reminders, because one "ping" is easy to miss. Why cant I have a fucking calendar reminder that actually reminds me about stuff with sounds?

3) The "new" windows taskbar that combines instances of same program into one button. Do they assume that most users treat windows like a toy? Nearly every office worker has like 3-5 excel files open, 3-5 emails, maybe some PDFs - and has to switch between them. Due to the fact that taskbar is combined by default, incredible amounts od productivity are lost

4) Hibernation is hidden. So you are supposed to turn off your computer every day, then come to the office, wait for 10 minutes for it to turn on (all the antivirus, constant updates, VPN), then turn your programs back, then turn your files / emails back. So you waste another minutes to setup the computer back to work. Compare it with hibernating, where you get your work back exactly the way you left it the day before. (and yes I am aware that updates are important and so on, since they defend against zero-days, but a multi-billion dollar company has the resources to figure out how to do them without productivity loss)

5) Bonus points: your computer can wake up at 3 am to install updates and also wake you up (maybe they changed it recently, or maybe admins control this by policy)

6) Random shutdowns, because some update is so incredibly important that at least once per quarter they have to force you to turn off your computer. Bonus points are when a window pop-up "restart now" and "ok" is the selected default so you accidentally press it while typing (and yes, I do restart my computer at least once per week to get updates)

However Microsoft is no longer interested in doing any productivity studies. They dont care. Now it seems their main goal is to offshore development to low cost countries. So we get software that looks as if it was done by lowest bidder.

[eternityforest]

I wonder why there's no true modern replacement for Excel that preserves the same versatility and ease of use for nontechnical users.

Every user could just have their own file, in which they could stash records(Or updates to other people's records), and you could have interfaces to view the data that look like a typical spreadsheet.

The data itself could live in an unsorted set of JSON objects with UUIDs, but the UI could be just as easy as Excel, you'd get tables that you could add or remove columns to and from, and put formulas in the fields, and query in some stripped down language with similar power to Excel.

And it could be 100% compatible, you would be free to put your data in the spreadsheet like the old fashioned way, sync with any cloud including SyncThing and no cloud at all, and data files could just be plain CSV you could version.

[nullindividual]

Linking two Excel files and consuming data between them requires the workbooks be open in Excel.

Power Query is no where close to what you described it as. It was not created for SharePoint or real time coauthoring. It is for getting and transforming data.