[icebraining]

I don't see it as optimizing for disk, I see it as optimizing for time, by presenting relevant events vis-à-vis showing every irrelevant detail. Much like a movie or novel doesn't usually show its characters going to the bathroom, neither should my coworkers have to sift through my misspellings, dumb decisions and irrelevant debugging.

I agree that we could benefit from saving more (e.g. relevant exploratory sessions, though those tend to happen in the REPL, not in the code editor), but I disagree with an indiscriminate approach.

[dkuntz2]

Storyteller has ways to filter out your misspellings, dumb decisions, and irrelevant debugging.

While the process for filtering out dumb decisions and irrelevant debugging is a little convoluted at present, filtering out misspellings is really easy if they're made within X seconds (where X is defined by you). Because Storyteller currently only supports IDEs (specifically Eclipse, hopefully with support for Visual Studio soon) you should be able to notice those quickly.

As for processing out dumb decisions, you don't really know they're dumb until after you've made them, and someone new to a part of the project might also have the same idea you had when made those decisions, and seeing that you made them, hopefully coupled with some comments on what went wrong with those choices could push them in a different direction, or help them fill in a piece you were missing. Watching those past decisions could also help you in the future when you come back to some code and can't remember what you did before or why.

Exploratory sessions only happen in REPLs when the language has a REPL. Considering that Storyteller's written in Java, has support only for an IDE that was initially built for Java, and has been written by a bunch of college students and one professor at a college where most CS courses use C++ or Java, REPLs aren't really things most of us use (I want to change that, but there's only so much you can do through an extracurricular organization).

Plus, we're developers. Why store only some data when you can store ALL THE DATA!

[markm208]

Imagine if the author of the novel had to write those irrelevant scenes anyway in order to get to the good stuff. There might be someone, a literature academic for example, who would want to study that material. It wouldn't be for everyone but there are some who might want access to it. My point is that we are generating this history anyway, so why throw it out? There may be someone who wants to see how the code has evolved. Plus, nobody says you have to watch stuff that is not interesting. There are ways to filter out things you aren't interested in.