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Comment by tylerhou | Hacker News Reader

Just curious (and no negative implications whatsoever): is "we made it so that only one person at a time can type in a paragraph. No longer can that annoying classmate delete what you just typed" code for "operational transforms are hard to implement, especially without a source of truth?"

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Yes and no :) I did indeed not implement OT, but it's also a true story that I would create a Google Doc and share it, nobody knows what to write, I type a sentence, and my classmates delete it as a joke, to mess with me :)

But yeah, feedback on the collaboration is welcome. Do you think editing one sentence with multiple people is necessary, and if so why? And on the other end of the spectrum, Word-style edit requests (which need to be approved before they are applied) are also sometimes necessary.

It's good to have if you want to go peer2peer eg. not having a server in between. Btw, Google Docs don't use a OT, or only a simple one, it does depend on the server and that you are online.

A writing style that I try to use is that I just type ... don't look up words, just write YYY where I can't find the right word to use, then I read the text and fix all spelling errors, sentences, remove unnecessary parts etc. That way you can be in flow. But instead of you doing the fixing later, someone else can do it for you - while you are writing!

Do you have a source on Google docs not using OT? I remember reading Google's description of Google docs with a reference to seminal OT paper.

https://youtu.be/yCcWpzY8dIA?list=LL9RQYUX_WIjk8SAcyuarJEw About 25 minutes in. And it is called OT, so I stand corrected. It does require a server though. I was confusing it with CRDT.

Google Docs does use OT. Or at least it did about six years ago, and I doubt that has changed. Source: I cowrote the original implementation (which was not OT, it was a three way merge of complete HTML files), and I was around when a new team rewrote the entire app using OT.

Historical note: live three way merging of HTML files, being produced by content-editable div implementations in different browsers, which like to rewrite each other's coding decisions in arbitrary ways (suddenly all your BRs become Ps, whee!) is "fun" in a way that I don't really ever need to revisit.

My main use case for Docs is collaborative fiction writing. There's no concept of "paragraph ownership"; there will be two or more people editing the document, and we'll go over it a half-doze or more times, editing as we go.

The ability to make arbitrary changes is essential for this.

There's no permanent paragraph ownership in Airborn OS either, but it's locked for about 10 seconds when you edit a paragraph. Or are you saying that the two editors would be editing the same paragraph at the same time?

Yes, that also happens frequently.

To offer a different use case: as a high school English teacher I will commonly work through a paragraph with a student, commenting and modifying as we discuss. The lock out would be quite frustrating.

I use Google Docs only for work. It never happened that we inadvertently deleted each other's work but it happens that we have cursors in the same paragraph.

Maybe there are multiple reasons for that.

One is that we're not in the business of trolling coworkers and losing time, quite the opposite. However I can understand that when I was little that would be fun sometimes.

Another reason is that we often use another channel to coordinate our work, email (I'll be working on that), chat or voice calls. The risk of undoing someone's work is nil.

With the approach of Airborn it could happen that I have to say "please move your cursor somewhere else so I can show you an alternative" or fix a typo. That would be odd and make us lose time.

Or, you could just wait the ten seconds the lock lasts.

Sounds really pragmatic. Two people editing exactly the same thing at the same time sounds confusing; not just really hard to implement. i.e. Why would anyone want someone amending as they type. This approach makes the user experience simpler and simplifies the implementation. I like it :).

The only scenario where I can see this being a bad decision would be for bots. For example, if you had a spell checker loaded which ran as a separate user rather than under your own session; so the spell checker couldn't auto-correct words until you'd finished typing the sentence. Here I'm imagining something like Rosie the translator bot from the original Google Wave demo... But I don't think you have bots anyway, so this won't be a concern for the present anyway.

FWIW OT isn't the only algo you can use to implement collaborative editing:

* https://medium.com/@raphlinus/towards-a-unified-theory-of-op... * https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00071240

If you want a library it exists too:

* https://github.com/josephg/ShareJS

I for one welcome this decision. I would perhaps limit the locking to one sentence at a time (which may split into several after editing) rather than a paragraph, and with an optional timeout for inactivity.

I am a big fan of open source alternatives to Google and Facebook (see Qbix). Do you mind if I contact you?

should give users the ability to lock specific regions by selecting them

I agree. This may be a useful and simple way to implement locking. Often when editing for things other than minor punctuation or spelling, individual sentences or paragrapshs often get split or combined as statements are rephrased or ideas reorganized.

Sure! info at <the domain name of this submission>.

Suggest mode solves the problem elegantly. Google docs has had this for a while.

This is an immediate non-starter for me.

I have had plenty of real-world situations, with Google Docs, whereby I have fixed someone else's spelling (or vice versa) as they have been typing. Working on sheets/slides where this isn't available has always felt awkward in comparison, and I wouldn't look to get more of it.

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