Hold On A Second There, Partner

One of the devs on  project many of us work on was excited to announce that we'd topped 2000 commits on the project. I'm a pedant. I know that we configure our projects with a lot of "administrativa" bots, so I wanted to look harder at the numbers. What I found was:

The raw number of commits was:

$ git shortlog -s -n | awk '{ sum += $1 } END { print sum }'
2008

Total minus bot-commits:

$ git shortlog -s -n | grep -v bot | awk '{ sum += $1 } END { print sum }'
1476

Total minus bot- and merge-commits:

$ git shortlog -s -n --no-merges | grep -v bot | awk '{ sum += $1 } END { print sum }'
752

I wasn't trying to rain on his parade, but it is kind of cool that you can break things out that way and see just how much of your project's activity is "administrativa" type of actions.

Also, removing the filtering/counting pipelines gives you a nice output of who's contributed and how much (though "how much" is only in commits ...which, in our case, are generally squashed when merging back from an individual developer's fork).

"Simple" Doesn't Always Mean It's Actually "Simpler"

Let it be known, if you're part of the group of people that have been foisting "simplified" markup tools on the community at large, I probably want to chop you in the adam's apple. HTML just ain't that hard to learn, especially the basics you'd need to do project documentation. And, if you find that your "simplified" documentation-language isn't sufficient to documentation tasks, the solution isn't to continue down the path of making your "simplified" markup language more complex. That's simply a sign that you screwed up and should probably set fire to what you've done to date.

We've been through this before with the whole "SGML was too hard, let's create HTML" debacle. I don't want to be back here again in 10-15 years having to deal with a plethora of new "simplified" markup languages just because today's "simplified" markup languages have become too complex.

• A dozen plus flavors of things all claiming to be "markdown" isn't an improvement over knowing basic HTML and CSS
• Having to differentiate the subtleties between each of the flavors isn't an improvement over knowing basic HTML and CSS.
• Relying on bridge markup tools like reStructured isn't an improvement over knowing basic HTML and CSS (especially if I have to pollute my markdown with it). And, frankly, its syntax is more clunky and gibberish than either HTML or even troff/nroff.

Knock off the sprawling simplifications. You're not improving things, you're making things even more of a shit show (and, by extension, further discouraging people to write documentation at all).