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Comment by scherlock | Hacker News Reader

The fact that software engineers are the only folks with the skills to do what you just said.

When I was working on PhD thesis 20 years ago, I had a giant makefile that generated my graphs and tables then generated the thesis from LaTeX.

All of it was in version control, made it so much easier, but no way anyone other than someone that uses those tools would be able figure it out.

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> The fact that software engineers are the only folks with the skills to do what you just said.

I've always been impressed by the amount of effort that people are willing to put in to avoid using version control. I used mercury about 18 years ago, and then moved to git when that took off, and I never write much text for work or leisure without putting it in git. I don't even use branches at all outside of work - it's just so that the previous versions are always available. This applies to my reading notes, travel plans, budgeting, etc.

Version control is fantastic, and you can get quite creative with it too. Git scraping for example (https://simonwillison.net/2021/Dec/7/git-history/). But as nice as Git is, people who are not trained to be a software developer or computer scientist often don't have a lot of exposure to it, and when they do it's a relatively big step to learn to use it. In my mechanical engineering studies we had to do quite a bit of programming, but none of my group mates ever wanted to use version control, not even on bigger projects. The Jacquard notebook and other Ink&Switch projects are aimed at people with non-software backgrounds, which is quite nice to see :)

Oh, they all use version control.

It just looks like "conf_paper1.tex" "conf_paper3.tex" "conf_paper_friday.tex" "conf_paper_20240907.tex" "conf_paper_last_version.tex" "conf_paper_final.tex"

...

"conf_paper_final2.tex"

Oh, and the figures reference files on local dir structure.

And the actual, eventually published version, only exists in email back and forth with publisher for style files etc.

I once worked with a professor and some graduate students who insisted on using box as a code repository since it kept a log of changes to files under a folder. I tried to convince them to switch to git by making a set of tutorial videos explaining the basics but it was still not enough to convince them to switch.

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