Gource VS git-of-theseus

The underlying technology, https://gource.io/, has probably been mentioned here before, but it's a superb tool which produces beautiful animations, so deserves another airing.

This is really cool. And as OP pointed out, I really like the pipeline integration. Like when linting catches function-level complexity, but in a cross functional way. I prefer to think of programs in layers where the top layers can import lower layers, but never the other way (and also very cautious on horizontal imports). Something like this would help track that.

From the visualization perspective, it reminds me a lot of Gource. Gource is a cool visualization showing contributions to a repo. You see individual contributors buzzing around updating files on per-commit and per-merge.

https://github.com/acaudwell/Gource

Nešto kao gource?

Yeah, I was completely distracted trying to figure out what `import { Button, icons } from "ui"` was derived from. Looks like `

That being said, I do like the overall idea of animating code changes. Calls back to that old Facebook sketching app[0] that would let us share replays, and I am a fan of the stories that Gource[1] can tell.

Ultimately, though, the sequential text file is a bad metaphor for code. Best thing for it is to split your modules across files.

0. Can't remember the name of it, but something similar is https://sketchtoy.com/

1. https://gource.io/

If the goal is to create a fun animation, then have a look at https://gource.io/ for inspiration.

From https://github.com/acaudwell/Gource

I wonder what your history would look like in Gource: https://gource.io/

https://github.com/erikbern/git-of-theseus

A tangentially related tool you can use to look at a repo over time is Git of Theseus[1]. It shows things like "what percentage of the code in this repo survives 6 months.

[1]https://erikbern.com/2016/12/05/the-half-life-of-code.html

There're some more in the presentation article: https://erikbern.com/2016/12/05/the-half-life-of-code.html#:...

A kernel line has half-life 6.6 years.

Look at the codebase with Git of Theseus or Codescene

I guess one good example (that was mentioned just yesterday here on HN) would be Flask vs FastAPI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31953470 - "There are no open issues or pull requests on Flask "

Quick count finds that FastAPI has 48422 lines of code, while Flask has 9995. Flask just achieved "Zero standing issues/PRs" while FastAPI has 1.1K open issues and ~500 open PRs.

Large surface area/API quickly leads to be overwhelmed when you're trying to maintain it. Adding new features/fixing existing ones becomes harder as well.

Best bet to make sure something is maintainable over time is to add as little as possible to it, and if you really have to, make sure you're also removing something at the same time.

Otherwise you need a massive team just to be able to "survive" and not making things rot.

There is this blogpost as well about the "half-life of code": https://erikbern.com/2016/12/05/the-half-life-of-code.html

Someone run that tool on the Clojure codebase as well, and it really shows how well the Clojure codebase has been written, as most code that was initially written is still there and does what it needs, without having to be rewritten.

Some parts of technical debt, you can find with https://github.com/erikbern/git-of-theseus or https://codescene.com/