Subverting Source Control (and the Rise of Functional Languages)

Now that Google has ported Subversion to their infrastructure, it must be about time for it to go out of fashion. I hear that large corporations are using Subversion quite extensively internally, which has got to be the kiss of death. So what's next?

Predicting the future is a dangerous business, but I'm quite interested in Darcs. It's entirely decentralized -- each installation stands entirely on its own, with no explicit branching required. The article linked above makes it sound fantastic. I guess I wonder if that's practical for large projects with lots of history (thousands of files, tens of thousands of transactions, large binary artifacts). But as much as Subversion makes branch management easier, it's still branch management. Arguments about who merges what to where rage eternally. And it's too easy to lose important version commit comments.

Oh, and it's written in Haskell -- a purely functional language. It sounds like a dare: write a program whose sole concern is state (of the source repository) in a language which thinks state is a dirty word.

Now playing: Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head.

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