Not to mention the misery one feels when they discover that oh, there is in fact no reason at all, or if there ever was, it is now truly lost.
More often than not, you only need a few jumps before reaching the change you're interested in.
I have a 1500LOC files with 1100 revisions right here, "git annotate" processes it in 2.356 seconds on a 2010 MBP, and PyCharm barely takes any longer (maybe 3s).
> How is my IDE supposed to know which of those revisions are the ones that I care about?
It does not care, it gives you a baseline annotation and if that's too recent you drill down into previous annotations.
No thanks. I’d rather have a comment inline in the code than add 3 seconds per file, and still have to go searching through the history.
Or as I've encountered on multiple occasions: your IT team is struggling to figure out why your network/version control/etc are extremely slow... 3 second queries are now taking 60 seconds... we will be rebooting servers a few times... and restoring backups... hopefully things are working better tomorrow!
Or what happens when you migrate to another versioning system? Where I was working migrated from MS SourceSafe years ago and a lot of comment history was lost in the conversion and apparently it wasn't worth the time/money to figure out why only half the comments made it over.
I'm sure there are more scenarios.
The point is: comments in plain-text source files can be invaluable.
Which is exacerbated by everyone's IDE now querying VC for every file!
That's what annotate/blame is for.
> Not to mention the misery one feels when they discover that oh, there is in fact no reason at all, or if there ever was, it is now truly lost.
If there was "no reason at all", it won't be in a comment either.