diff, a top-5 software tool

Mike Hoye, Fifty Years of Diff:

My friend Greg Wilson has argued, and I absolutely believe, that you can divide the entire computational universe into who has diff and patch, and who doesn’t. It’s the seed crystal of all workable open collaboration, and people living without it don’t even have the language to recognize how bad they’ve got it.

Re:re:RE:DRAFT-draft-V7-FINAL-FINAL2.doc is just no way to live, and if you live in word processors, spreadsheets, slides, art, anything without diff and patch you’re definitely feeling this pain, even if you don’t have a term for it.

Yep. diff, along with its trusty companion patch is a developer superpower. (Even though patch came 10 years later, apparently, TIL.)

diff made source control possible, so I have to think it’s in the top 5 accelerants to software development of all time¹. Let alone using diff or patch under the hood in systems to move changes around.

Even the concept of diff is a big deal!

Part of the superpower of being a developer is the idea that you can analyze two pieces of data with a common lineage, extract the changes, and work with/reason about the changes as first-class data. Were it only that more non-developer tools had this capability!