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Comment by ebbv | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a classic case of novice developers thinking it's a great idea to re-invent the wheel. The page gives no compelling reason why I'd want to adopt this over the much more mature solutions out there.

I say they are novice because they are maintaining two parallel codebases, which is a mistake no experienced developer would make.

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I disagree. Having maintained a massive system that had to go deep into Git's internal data structures, I will tell you that, regardless of what Git's docs might tell you, the actual documentation for most of Git's file formats is, "Whatever the Git commands actually output." This is part of why a perfectly legal Git repository (as far as Git itself is concerned) can sometimes crash libgit2 and JGit.

By the Pijul team forcing themselves to have two different implementations in lockstep, they will probably do a very good job avoiding that problem.

That is the most ass backwards reasoning I've ever heard.

In order to force yourself to stick to a reliable standard repository format, maintain two codebases at once.

What?

How about just publish a standard and abide by it.

Clearly rank amateurs to develop a working piece of software from category theory.

Experience in an academic discipline does not imply experience in software development. I don't know the authors, so I hesitate to judge, but starting with two code bases seems like a pretty rookie move to me, at least without a very compelling reason.

Just look at those plebeians at Shen.

It might not be such a bad idea. If the main goal is to develop a specification or standard then it makes sense to have several implementations. The implementations can be used to flesh out and improve the specification.

Also, from their website:

Why rewrite it in Scala?

The Scala implementation is not competing with the OCaml implementation, we do plan to maintain both in the future. Having several implementations of the core forced us to really think the formats through, and will allow others to write tools in the languages the like best, for their favorite platform (try to get and compile OCaml Pijul on Windows!).

I missed that section. Seems like they've thought it through. Well, more power to them!

That's not at all a rookie move. Using two code bases, preferrably in different languages, makes issues in documentation and standardization far more obvious.

The approach is quite costly but if you care more about quality and creating an excellent standard than getting a product out of the door quickly, it's certainly worth it.

  darcs.reviewed$ darcs log --match 'author florent\.becker' --count
  200