[Monotone-devel] Re: user-friendly hash formats, redux

[graydon hoare]

Nathan Myers wrote:

> It's trivial to design and implement hashes that are a lot more 
> human-compatible, and certain to succeed.  There is no conceivable 
> merit to sticking with hex in any case.  Even octal or pure alphabetic
> (e.g. a-q) would be better -- unless the goal is to keep away people 
> who aren't macho enough.

well, I said earlier that I've "been resisting" this, and I meant it. we
talked about it, njs implemented a little prototype demonstrating it,
and I decided I really didn't like it. I really do resist the idea that
a non-numeric quasi-random number is any friendlier than a numeric one.
it's more rememberable, yes. but it's also *weirder*.

people see quasi-random numbers, or number-letter combinations, all the
time. pointers, database keys, UPC codes, passports, credit cards,
k-mart loyalty cards, student numbers, ISBNs, license plates, zip codes.

people see random strings of intelligible words or phonemes in one
place: out of the mouths of crazy people.

from my perspective, I see a change which makes monotone look more like
it's gone insane to be a bad thing. better to be boring and slightly
harder to remember. this scheme has come up in other tools too (ssh,
pgp) and as far as I know *nobody uses it* because it looks weird.
nutty. uncomfortable. I don't know how else to put it. it's like that
part of tla where you have to do "echo 'it sure does' >http-blows"; sure
you can *understand* that this is some form of control system, but it
was chosen in a way which is less tasteful than something uniformly
boring, like "echo http >protocol".

> Who knows how well any experimental naming scheme will turn out?  
> Should we insist on driving users away until after all the experiments
> are done?  Anyhow, every alternative would benefit from a sane hash 
> format, for disambiguation.

I'm interested in experimenting with naming schemes which lend more
meaning and familiarity to monotone, and look "more boring" (i.e. like
CVS or SVN). I'd like to focus the discussion on that if possible.

I'll grant that I might just be projecting my own "crazy programmer
beliefs" onto the general population (of programmers -- monotone's
target audience). if you can do a survey which demonstrates that I'm
wrong on this, go for it. but until then, I'm not going to spend any
effort on implementing/maintaining/fixing a word/phoneme system.

-graydon