Stupid idea, coding isn't writing a novel!
It becomes obvious that the commercially exploited development tools have reached their current limit if companies suddenly try to sell us this kind of crap. Because who in their right mind would use anything like this?
It's already difficult to administrate a larger team project because although you expect every programmer to do their best to send in flawless code, the reality shows us that everyone can make a mistake. The larger your project grows the more important quality checking will become. And even then most project developers prefer that others (so devs. other than the coder(s) themselves) go over the code manually because humans can often spot certain hiccups better than automations.
This is also one of the reasons VCS can be so extremely invaluable because it allows you to pick out every single commit to check it out, and also apply full control over it. Something tells me that this kind of failsave won't be part of this monstrosity. At least not the first releases because... If you sell people a fully working product then what's left to sell them at a later time?
Sure; if you use this system to get someone else to go over your code to spot mishaps then I'm confident that it'll work and can become a valuable tool. But that's not pair programming, one person wouldn't be programing but merely quality checking.
But to actually program on the same thing together both participants would have to know exactly what the goal is. So: the initial programmer would first have to explain the goal, how to reach it, what to do and what not to do (for example: with Java you'd either want getters and setters or not, or you want private's because this will be stand alone or you recon that it might become part of something bigger so lets go for protected instead) and then also you'd have to divide your tasks. Who does what?
So my dilemma: wouldn't all that time spend on getting the coding strategy explained be much better spent on the actual coding?
I wonder how long before we can see this scheme used to excuse ones coding mishaps.. "Yes, the code was crappy as heck but it wasn't my fault. My coding pairing buddy made a mess, not me. So you shouldn't be criticizing me (even though I sent in the code in the first place)...".
I'll stick to vim for now :P
Biting the hand that feeds IT
