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Re:Why Microsoft Word must die by kijin on Saturday October 12, 2013 @06:44AM (#6538259)
Actually, that's what I was trying to say.

Word's review functions appear as pretty colored bubbles and a bunch of icons on the Ribbon. It's easy enough even for Humanities professors to use on a daily basis, despite the fact that as a VCS, it's strictly inferior to something like git. Actually, I think it's popular precisely because it ain't git. Most professors who are fluent in Word's review functions would be hopelessly lost when faced with a Dropbox conflict, let alone merging git repos.

Re:Why Microsoft Word must die by srikrishnan on Saturday October 12, 2013 @05:07PM (#6540317)
Totally agree that word's review functions are really simple. Which is why even all legal/contract documents are exchanged back and forth between companies in Word today. The hassle is that its done over email - sending versions of attachments back and forth. Nice naming convention helps, but there are definitely better solutions to do the same online today.
Re:Why Microsoft Word must die by eigenvalue on Saturday October 12, 2013 @08:12PM (#6540939)
Actually, most big law firms do not use the built in track changes function in Word, they use more specialized (and in my experience, better performing) software that take a "before" and "after" Word file and then generate a nice "redlined" version showing insertions, deletions, moves, etc. in different colors. Examples include Workshare DeltaView and Litera Change Pro.
Re:Why Microsoft Word must die by eru on Sunday October 13, 2013 @07:09AM (#6542196)
Word itself allows you to compare multiple files nowadays. (Though I don't know if it does three-way merges, yet.)
Re:Why Microsoft Word must die by lallysingh on Sunday October 13, 2013 @05:10AM (#6541960)
I think you're absurdly underestimating people. A diff is a bunch of lines removed, and lines added. That's a pretty damn natural representation.

As for git's complexity, it's all in its completely opaque display of its internal state. A chain of deltas - diffs - isn't complicated. It's all git's (perverse) desire to follow the exact-same command-line interface as cat and awk, when neither contain persistent state.

Re:Why Microsoft Word must die by kijin on Sunday October 13, 2013 @08:03AM (#6542297)
It's not the concept of a diff that baffles ordinary people. It's (a) the lack of an intuitive interface, and (b) poor integration with natural languages, that make most VCS's difficult to use in the context of a word processor.

Word shows pretty bubbles next to sections that have been edited. The bubbles are color-coded so it's easy to tell who did what. The edits can be accepted, rejected, or further modified with a couple of clicks. There is no list of commands or keyboard shortcuts to memorize. Just a bunch of icons, menus, and clicking around.

Word doesn't require your content to be made up of neat lines of verse, either. Natural languages don't organize themselves into 78-char lines. It should be OK to edit a few words in a long paragraph of prose. Even Wikipedia's messy "Revision History" is probably better than git in this regard.

Re:Why Microsoft Word must die by read on Sunday October 13, 2013 @11:59AM (#6542998)
I liked what https://draftin.com did around version control.
Re:Why Microsoft Word must die by PeterisP on Sunday October 13, 2013 @09:10AM (#6542469)
'a bunch of lines removed/added' is a great representation for stuff that consist of semi-atomic lines, like code.

It is a horrible representation for stuff where edits may consist of both typo fixes, and separate wording changes in a single sentence - where you might want to accept change to one word and reject change to another word, despite that they came from a single "commit" to a single line.

For collaborative text editing both word's track changes and google docs features are far superior to git.

Re:Why Microsoft Word must die by jfb on Sunday October 13, 2013 @10:21AM (#6542667)
I'd argue that it's not that great a representation for code, which should be diff'd syntactically.
Re:Why Microsoft Word must die by lallysingh on Monday October 14, 2013 @06:21AM (#6546380)
You have the same problem with software.
Re:Why Microsoft Word must die by tripzilch on Sunday October 13, 2013 @02:27PM (#6543575)
FWIW, I don't often encounter diff output in my day-to-day computer usage, but when I do, I do not find them very intuitive to understand. A bit of UI magic would help here, it's not the concept that is hard (for me) to grasp, just all those lines with +'s and -'s and figuring out the contexts in which they apply. It's always a bit of a puzzle, especially if, for some reason, it's not highlighted with colours.
Re:Why Microsoft Word must die by jeltz on Sunday October 13, 2013 @05:56PM (#6544300)
git is good here since it by default has colored diffs.