Plurrrr

Every now and again I come across some discussion on making Emacs “modern”.¹ The argument always go more or less like this - Emacs doesn’t look and behave like and the world will end if we don’t copy something “crucial” from it.

While I’m not a programmer per se, I do use git almost daily and find it a great tool for source control and versioning of plain text files. But I don’t think there can be any doubt that it is not the easiest tool to use. But despite its unintuitive user interface, under the hood git is quite simple and elegant. I believe that if you can understand the fundamental constructs git uses to store, track, and manage files, then the using git becomes a lot easier.

In this article we’re going to take a look under the covers and investigate git’s fundamental constructs. We’ll start off with its storage model and look at blobs, trees and commits. We’ll see how branches are implemented, and finally we’ll unpack the git index file to understand what happens during the staging of a commit.

Yesterday, I released perl v5.36.0. I think this is the most exciting release of perl in quite some time, and I’m hoping that in a few months, I’ll still be as pleased with it as I am today. Here’s a summary of what we got done, what we didn’t get done, and (to some extent) how it got done.