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@ -58,8 +58,8 @@ me immeasurably in my own work.</p> |
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</li> |
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<li><a href="#a-literary-problem">2. a literary problem</a></li> |
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<li><a href="#programmerthink">3. programmerthink</a></li> |
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<li><a href="#diff-wdiff-git">4. diff, wdiff, git</a></li> |
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<li><a href="#programs-amp-programmering">programs & programmering</a></li> |
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<li><a href="#diff-wdiff-git">4. diff, wdiff, git</a></li> |
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<li><a href="#further-reading">further reading</a> |
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<ul> |
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@ -1410,43 +1410,6 @@ steps to writing or finding blog entries.</p> |
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Sometimes the best way to answer that question is to start writing code that |
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handles a given abstraction.</p> |
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<h1><a name=diff-wdiff-git href=#diff-wdiff-git>#</a> 4. diff, wdiff, git</h1> |
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<p>If you’re the sort of person who took a few detours into the history of |
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religion in college, you might be familiar with some of the ways people used to |
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do textual comparison. When pen, paper, and typesetting were what scholars |
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had to work with, they did some amazingly sophisticated things in order to |
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expose the relationships between multiple pieces of text.</p> |
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<p>{slide: some textual criticism tools}</p> |
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<p>Here’s a book I got in college. <em>Gospel Parallels: A Comparison of the |
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Synoptic Gospels</em>, by Burton H. Throckmorton, Jr. It breaks up three books |
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from the Bible by the stories and themes that they contain, and shows the |
|
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|
overlapping sections of each book that contain parallel texts. You can work |
|
|
|
your way through and see what parts only show up in one book, or in two but not |
|
|
|
the other, or in all three. These kinds of tools support all sorts of |
|
|
|
theoretical stuff about which books copied each other and how, and what other |
|
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|
sources they might have copied that we’ve since lost.</p> |
|
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|
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<p>This is some <em>incredibly</em> dry material, even if you kind of dig thinking about |
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|
questions like how and when an important religious book was written and |
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|
compiled. It takes a special temperament to actually sit poring over |
|
|
|
fragmentary texts in ancient languages and do these painstaking comparisons. |
|
|
|
Even if you’re a writer or editor and work with a lot of revisions of a text, |
|
|
|
there’s a good chance you rarely do this kind of comparison on your own work, |
|
|
|
because that shit is <em>tedious</em>.</p> |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
<p>And yet it turns out that academics aren’t the only people who need tools for |
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|
comparing different versions of a text. Programmers, in fact, need to do this |
|
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|
<em>constantly</em>. Programmers are also happiest when putting off the <em>actual</em> task |
|
|
|
at hand to solve some incidental problem that cropped up along the way, so by |
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|
now there are a lot of ways to say “here’s how this file is different from this |
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|
file”, or “here’s how this file is different from itself a year ago”. It turns |
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out that these work just about as well for English text as they do for code.</p> |
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<p>{demo various diff tools, source control}</p> |
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<h1><a name=programs-amp-programmering href=#programs-amp-programmering>#</a> programs & programmering</h1> |
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<p>A bit ago, I said that “the way you use the computer is often just to write |
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@ -1489,6 +1452,97 @@ string of weird characters all over again?</p> |
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<p>It turns out that Bash has you covered. Since shell commands are just text, |
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they can live in a file as easily as they can be typed.</p> |
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<p>Let’s say I’m curious how many words I’ve written so far in this book. Since |
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all of my chapters are in files called <code>index.md</code>, I can always do something |
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like the following:</p> |
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<!-- exec --> |
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<pre><code><b>$ pwd</b> |
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/home/brennen/code/userland-book/programs |
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</code></pre> |
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<!-- end --> |
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<!-- exec --> |
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<pre><code><b>$ cd .. && find . -name 'index.md' | xargs wc -w</b> |
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369 ./diff/index.md |
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4299 ./literary_environment/index.md |
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893 ./literary_problem/index.md |
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236 ./index.md |
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1990 ./programmerthink/index.md |
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456 ./programs/index.md |
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224 ./further_reading/index.md |
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8467 total |
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</code></pre> |
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<!-- end --> |
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<p>That’s pretty easy to remember, but let’s say I’m picky and want to see it in |
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the order the chapters are actually arranged. I could pretty easily write a |
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file that lists them all, one-per line:</p> |
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<!-- exec --> |
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<pre><code><b>$ cat ../chapters</b> |
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./index.md |
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./literary_environment/index.md |
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./literary_problem/index.md |
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./programmerthink/index.md |
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./programs/index.md |
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./diff/index.md |
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./further_reading/index.md |
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./links.md |
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</code></pre> |
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<!-- end --> |
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|
<h1><a name=diff-wdiff-git href=#diff-wdiff-git>#</a> 4. diff, wdiff, git</h1> |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
<p>If you’re the sort of person who took a few detours into the history of |
|
|
|
religion in college, you might be familiar with some of the ways people used to |
|
|
|
do textual comparison. When pen, paper, and typesetting were what scholars |
|
|
|
had to work with, they did some amazingly sophisticated things in order to |
|
|
|
expose the relationships between multiple pieces of text.</p> |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
<p>{slide: some textual criticism tools}</p> |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
<p>Here’s a book I got in college. <em>Gospel Parallels: A Comparison of the |
|
|
|
Synoptic Gospels</em>, by Burton H. Throckmorton, Jr. It breaks up three books |
|
|
|
from the Bible by the stories and themes that they contain, and shows the |
|
|
|
overlapping sections of each book that contain parallel texts. You can work |
|
|
|
your way through and see what parts only show up in one book, or in two but not |
|
|
|
the other, or in all three. These kinds of tools support all sorts of |
|
|
|
theoretical stuff about which books copied each other and how, and what other |
|
|
|
sources they might have copied that we’ve since lost.</p> |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
<p>This is some <em>incredibly</em> dry material, even if you kind of dig thinking about |
|
|
|
questions like how and when an important religious book was written and |
|
|
|
compiled. It takes a special temperament to actually sit poring over |
|
|
|
fragmentary texts in ancient languages and do these painstaking comparisons. |
|
|
|
Even if you’re a writer or editor and work with a lot of revisions of a text, |
|
|
|
there’s a good chance you rarely do this kind of comparison on your own work, |
|
|
|
because that shit is <em>tedious</em>.</p> |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
<p>And yet it turns out that academics aren’t the only people who need tools for |
|
|
|
comparing different versions of a text. Programmers, in fact, need to do this |
|
|
|
<em>constantly</em>. Programmers are also happiest when putting off the <em>actual</em> task |
|
|
|
at hand to solve some incidental problem that cropped up along the way, so by |
|
|
|
now there are a lot of ways to say “here’s how this file is different from this |
|
|
|
file”, or “here’s how this file is different from itself a year ago”. It turns |
|
|
|
out that these work just about as well for English text as they do for code.</p> |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
<p>{demo various diff tools, source control}</p> |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
<h1><a name=further-reading href=#further-reading>#</a> further reading</h1> |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
<p><em>The Unix Programming Environment</em> - Brian W. Kernighan, Rob Pike</p> |
|
|
|
|
Brennen Bearnes
8 years ago