Version control, collaborative editing and undo

What are these guys building?

> The standard solution to any hard problem [which is] is to find someone who solved it already and steal their answer.

Reminds me a little of the Feynman algorithm. 1) Write your question into google. 2) Open the first three results. 3) Copy what you find.

Does it already have a name?

At first i wondered if the authors even know what they're making.. then in the first blog post i found a mention of Light Table. It was the concept IDE with a live preview or visualization about what parts of code output.

It appears the Eve the language evolved from that, and still is. And it seems this DVCS (what this article is about) is meant to compliment Eve.

It made me ask the question "but what is wrong with Git? What IS the problem Yet-Another is solving?"

Unfortunately another HN user ( m12k https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=m12k ) is [dead], but posted:

From http://incidentalcomplexity.com/hiring/ and http://www.chris-granger.com/2014/10/01/beyond-light-table/ it sounds like the people behind Light Table are now working on an Excel-like collaborative programming environment called Eve.

  Recording changes as they happen is easier than 
  inferring them after the fact

That's all very well if you're trying to develop something like Google Docs, where you can define change semantics the merge process understands, then constrain the editors to only allow changes that follow those semantics.

But the moment a user wants to take the code out of your editor to process it with some other tool - perhaps they want to sort that text file, or minify that javascript, or just edit in emacs because they like the keybindings - you're back to inferring the changes after the fact.

You'd have to build a lot of tools if you want to stop your users ever wanting to use a tool outside your editor :)