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I think it's a problem that you don't need to know Git that well to use it productively. Once you get the basic commands you can pretty much put away Git's docu
by ben_jones 10y ago
I think it's a problem that you don't need to know Git that well to use it productively. Once you get the basic commands you can pretty much put away Git's documentation for a few years until something goes particularly wrong. It's been on my "list" for a long time now to deep dive into it but I've just never had the impetus to do so despite the fact that I use Git every single day.
- ufo 10y agoI think the real problem is that "knowing git that well" is even a thing. If git's interface were more predictable and if its abstractions were less leaky, learning the basic commands would be enough and noone would ever need to do a deep dive into the documentation. I finally realized this after reading this xkcd comic[1]. Now I'm happily using mercurial (with hg-git) whenever I expect that I will need to do something nontrivial. https://xkcd.com/1597/ https://xkcd.com/1597/
- ben_jones 10y agoI.. yup. That comic never ceases to amaze me.
- mikaraento 10y agoI don't completely agree. While git definitely could still be more polished, the problem it tries to solve is fundamentally complicated. Git does a good job of cleanly modeling the graph of distributed changes and providing a set of useful operations on that graph. The disagreement is more about whether somebody has learned or should learn that underlying graph.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- blakeyrat 10y agoIf Git were well-designed, it'd be free of rough edges and "gotchas", and it would teach you how to use it as you used it by making use of discoverability. If Git were a well-engineered piece of software, it wouldn't even have a manual (certainly not a "required reading" manual).