this post was submitted on 26 May 2024
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Git

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What were your misconceptions about Git when you first started? (self.git)
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by canpolat to c/git
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I used CVS and ClearCase before moving into Git, and it took me some time to adjust to the fact that the cost of branching in Git is much much less than ClearCase. And getting into the "distributed" mindset didn't happen overnight.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I mean sure. I personally haven't researched and become an expert on this ... it is an early-user's misconceptions thread after all. And a dev can justifiably reflect on all of their tooling and consider their general usability against their popularity.

However, by the same token, your lack of any counter examples isn't exactly highly credible either.

Nonetheless:

  • Whenever I've seen an opinion from someone who's used both mercurial and git, their opinion is always that the mercurial interface and model "actually makes sense"
  • AFAICT, the git CLI (at least up until the more recent changes) has widely been recognised as being unnecessarily janky and confusing especially for common and basic tasks
  • Apart from that, many devs have shared that they always struggle to remember git commands and always need to rely on some reference/cheat-sheet (obligatory XKCD), which IMO is a product of it both having a poor CLI in need of polish and being a program/tool that isn't naturally constrained to CLI usage but rather naturally implemented with a graphical of some sort.
[–] lysdexic -1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Nonetheless

You didn't provided a single concrete example of something you actually feel could be improved.

The most concrete complain you could come up was struggling with remembering commands, again without providing any concrete example or specific.

Why is it so hard for critics to actually point out a specific example of something they feel could be improved? It's always "I've heard someone say that x".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Because this is a casual discussion and that’d be more effort than I’m willing to put in. Also, your premise is false: it can both be ~~trivial~~ NON-trivial to implement something better and relatively obvious that a better implementation could exist.

Also, if you’ve encountered these sorts of discussions before, I’d dare say it’s because people often avoid flame wars and you give off flame war energy.

I’ve mentioned two pretty concrete examples: be like mercurial and have a built in GUI. The basic commands being janky is also pretty concrete given the recent additions that have been made to correct that. But I don’t trust that you want a discussion because you’re being pretty demanding and aggressive here. Sea lioning would be somewhat apt … there is such a thing as meeting people where they are … do you have an example of something people often criticise about git that you don’t think can be improved or not easily? “Why is it so hard for replies to actually have a discussion rather than be demanding, argumentative and aggressive”

[–] lysdexic -1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Because this is a casual discussion and that’d be more effort than I’m willing to put in.

I didn't asked you to write a research paper. You accused Git of suffering from usability issues and I asked you to provide concrete examples.

And apparently that's an impossible task for you.

If you cannot come up with a single example and instead write a wall of text on you cannot put the effort to even provide a single opinion... What does this say about your claims?