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Article argues that git is intrinsically confusing--if you could redesign git from scratch, what would you change? (dl.acm.org)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/git

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[–] Corbin 6 points 7 months ago

A PDF is available here, and analysis from Colyer 2016 is good.

This paper is fascinating in terms of ethnography. Consider: the paper mentions "branch" or "branches" dozens of times, but only says "tree" four times, and every instance is in the phrase "working tree". The paper never mentions "blob" or "blobs", "DAG" or "graph" or "poset". The authors either chose to omit git's data model, or they don't know about it. The implication is that the UX and UI don't reflect the data model, I suppose, but it is a very curious omission.

Now, contrast this with Git's documentation. When sysadmins teach git, we focus on the data first. git is a kind of database which stores four different flavors of object, and the git UI is merely a collection of commands for programmatically manipulating the database. All of the various UX is purpose-built, on a per-command basis, for development workflows. New commands can be implemented as plain UINX-style executable scripts in any language.

In summary, this paper looks at git as a version-control product, while its developers and users look at git as a version-control framework.

There was a followup paper from a few years later, also with Colyer 2016 analysis; this paper has too many glaring defects to discuss here.

On a personal note, I saw this and am happy to note that science has marched along:

We plan to extend our notation to make it more expressive in the future, but are cognizant of the fact that diagrammatic syntaxes for first order logic have a long and troubled history.

Not long after this paper, ontology logs were figured out, which can be made as expressive as needed for the case of relations; see Patterson 2017.