[ozim]

It solves so many problems and makes it so easy to implement if you go this way.

But just like mentioned it is hard to convince people that it is what they actually want.

People fall into some grand illusion that everything should be always available but in reality then one person is doing changes at a time and if somehow 2 or more people have to work on something - more often than not they should be talking or communicating with each other anyway to synchronize.

Even with GIT and fully distributed development you cannot solve conflicts automagically. You still have to communicate with others and understand context to pick correct changes.

[calvinmorrison]

you can only have one person work on the code at a time? that seems, very very obviously dumb

[ozim]

I can change A to B on my own, you can change A to C on your own.

At some point we have to communicate which change is correct.

It does not have to be synchronous and it might be via commit message - but still change alone is not enough for conflict resolution.

If you edit word document and someone then changes something there is no commit message but might be comment on document, email or im.

[__MatrixMan__]

Unison has a neat approach to this problem: References are hashes of the abstract syntax tree, the only way to write a "collision" is to write an identical function--which isn't actually a collision at all.

[zubairq]

Good point. I do the same in my own system and use Hashes of the source code, so there are no collisions. Slowly this technique will become mainstream I predict.

[SkyMarshal]

Multiple people can work on the code simultaneously and asynchronously, but conflict resolution must be done synchronously.