Making it easier to collaborate on code
Git is an open-source system with a polarizing reputation among programmers. It’s a powerful tool to help developers track changes to code, but many view it as prohibitively difficult to use. To make it more user-friendly, a team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has developed “Gitless,” an interface that fixes many of the system’s core problems without fundamentally changing what it does. “With Gitless we’ve developed a tool that we think is easier to learn and use, but that still keeps the core elements that make Git popular,” says graduate student Santiago Perez De Rosso, who co-wrote a related paper with MIT Professor Daniel Jackson. “What’s particularly encouraging about this work is that it suggests that the same approach might be used to improve the usability of other software systems, such as Dropbox and Google Inbox.” Gitless was developed, in part, by looking at nearly 2,400 Git-related questions from...