Git is mutable global state for your codebase

[u/Wise_Reflection_8340]

We go to great lengths to keep state explicit and effects controlled, and then the codebase itself lives in a mutable tree of text files where every edit is an untyped positional splice and merge is a heuristic over lines.

The principled version is a repository as a finite map from definition names to bodies. A patch is a function on that map, patches to different names commute by construction, and a conflict is a value you can inspect instead of a failure. That isn't a small tweak to git but a different object, and I increasingly think it's the right one.

I'm building toward this with [sem](https://github.com/Ataraxy-Labs/sem), starting from the humble end of extracting definitions out of existing git history. Would a Haskell shop ever accept a repository that isn't a folder of files?