Remote/Pair-Programming in-the-cloud

[Terry Reedy]

On 8/2/2019 4:44 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:

in response to my enquiries

> Not the OP, but weighing in from personal experience: I've often pair
> programmed using just a video call service (with screen share). The
> biggest downside is that it has to share the full image of the screen,
> which means it has to aggressively compress the video in order to
> handle home-grade internet connections. (OTOH, that does mean that
> it's IDE-independent, and can showcase literally anything.) If IDLE
> were to grow a peer-to-peer pair programming feature, I could imagine
> it being a text-only connection with a single master and any number of
> slaves, where the slaves are showing a replica of the master's screen.
> IMO the slaves should not need any way to directly manipulate
> anything, though it may be of value to be able to highlight a block of
> text and have the master see that highlight (independently of the
> master's own text selection). Having everyone able to edit
> simultaneously creates technological problems, and then a social
> problem (when you start trampling over each other's code by mistake),
> and the solution to the social problem usually amounts to a semaphore
> system "okay, you go ahead and take over"; baking that semaphore into
> the technology (by having only a single master) would keep things way
> simpler.

Thank you for the helpful response in a area where I lack experience. 
My response to Daniel includes my response to the above.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy