Let's Stop Pretending that Source Control is "Optional but Recommended"

Essentially all of us who make our living from the craft of software development, early in our careers, have had the experience of losing source code that we couldn't get back. Oh, we could type what we remembered into a file of the same name, but it has important differences that we will discover as we work with it. (There is no such thing as eidetic, or photographic, memory).

This has been recognised as a sufficiently universal phenomenon that most developers and managers I have known in the lsat 10-15 years (at least) use use of a versioning system as a filter against dangerous dilettantes; if someone claims to have developed "the next VisiCalc for Linux" without using one, the file containing that person's "CV" may be safely deleted (and do remember to Empty the Trash).

So why on $DEITY's green Earth do we still see well-meaning tutorials on blogs the Internet over which include a step titled "Setup source control (Optional but recommended)"? The particular tutorial that drew my ire this morning even went out of its way to note that you will need to use a "text editor of your choice" with the author noting that "I use Emacs". (Subject and direct object inverted in the original sentence, but that's another rant.)

Don't

DO

that!!

The person reading your tutorial is probably going to be someone with strong continuing economic motivation to improve his software skills; he's reading your tutorial on the off chance that you'll actually teach him something useful. Seeing those three words ("optional but recommended") tells him, almost literally, that you don't really take him seriously. Your half-dozen other readers are going to be (would-be) apprentices in the craft, just learning their way around; they can and, based on experience, will take those three words as permission to just blaze on ahead and, when something goes pear-shaped, to start all over. Maybe you think "nobody I know would take it that way", or even "how could anybody who can read this take it that way", but The Voice of Experience™ is here to tell you that this Internet thingie is a global phenomenon. People from all walks of life, with every language, technical and educational level variation imaginable, can wake up one fine morning and say "I'm going to learn something new, using the Internet", and set out to do just that. That's a feature, not a bug.

I can hear you sputtering "but I didn't want to have to cover how to set up a VCS or use it in the tutorial's workflow; I just wanted to teach people how to use batman.js". Fair enough, and a noble goal; I don't mean to dissuade you (it's actually a pretty good tutorial, by the way). Might I suggest adding to the bullet list under "Guide Assumptions" a new bullet with text approximating

• A version control system of your choice (I use Foo)

with an appropriate value of Foo. We don't care whether the Genteel Reader uses git, Bazaar, sccs, or Burt Wonderstone's Incredible Magical VCS; we can merely assume that if he and we are worth each other's time, he's using something; we only need that little extra bit of reinforcement. (Though some choices on that list might be cause for grave concern.)

One of the ways in which the craft of software development needs to change if it's ever going to become a professional engineering discipline is that we're going to have to hammer out and apply a shared set of professional ethics; the closest we've got now is various grab-bag lists of "best practices". I'd argue that "optional but recommended" source control is on the wrong side of one of the lines we need to draw.