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> Git is, like many professional tools, something you simply got to learn. No. Why do people think "professional" has to mean "poorly designed"? But then, the

> Git is, like many professional tools, something you simply got to learn. No. Why do people think "professional" has to mean "poorly designed"? But then, the rest of your post seems to miss the point of this thing entirely. You go on to say that you basically only need 10 commands...which is pretty much the insight that lead to Gitless in the first place.

k__ 10y ago
Why would someone write a tool for 10 commands?!
- tree_of_item 10y ago
  No one here did that. What are you talking about?
chowells 10y ago
"Professional" doesn't mean "Poorly designed". It means "designed so that people with lots of domain knowledge and experience with the tool find that it never gets in their way." In that sense, git is a professional tool. If you know everything about it, it doesn't get in your way. The problem is when you don't know everything about it..
- snoman 10y ago
  The burden of having to know everything about it, is precisely what gets in your way. Granted, I use an actual tool (sourcetree) that abstracts away the BS that is the git commandline. This idea that 'if you don't like the tool, it's because you're not good enough to use it, because you don't know everything about it' is elitist hokum.
- slavik81 10y ago
  I think this is because the commands are poorly named and badly organised. Professionals will use it frequently enough that they remember everything they need and find it easy from that point forward, but for beginners the unintuitive commands are a double-whammy. It's hard to find the command you want, and the poor naming is a hinderence to building a good mental model of the system.
- ubernostrum 10y ago
  In this sense, trivially, every tool is a "professional" tool, since if you just rote-memorize every aspect of it you know how to do everything it can do. The problem with git is the lack of coherence in its default UI. Multiple ways to accomplish the same task, git commands which perform incredibly different functions depending on (invisible) context, inability to decide whether commands or flags should act as the highest-level switches... It is simply the case that, no matter how beautifully and cleanly designed git's internals might be, the interface it presents to them has zero conceptual integrity.
  - Nursie 10y ago
    No, trivially, there can be tools that you know inside out which still present roadblocks to perfectly ordinary tasks and be a bad fit for the domain they operate in. Visual SourceSafe springs to mind here... Git, by comparison, is very flexible and allows you to do an awful lot, when you've learned it. You can learn SourceSafe inside out and still have it be a total pain in the arse.
    - ubernostrum 10y ago
      Again: git as some sort of Platonic ideal of an implementation of a DAG I don't care to argue about. But git's default user interface I will argue about until I'm out of breath, then keep arguing about. Nothing in that interface is designed to aid in learning. Nothing in it is designed so that mastering one task provides discoverability or intuitability of how to perform another task. It is a complex mess of inconsistencies, discontinuities and obscurities which point more to a lack of design or even of someone with authority to perform design than to anything else. It can only be "mastered" through rote memorization, and bears no necessary or useful relationship to the underlying data models and structures whatsoever.
      - Nursie 10y ago
        Eh. Fair enough, my pedant mode just kicked in when you said any tool could be a 'professional' tool in the sense the parent poster said. I have no particular view on how good or bad git's command line is - I have greatly enjoyed using SourceTree though, and the underlying DVCS seemed not to get in the way.
nine_k 10y ago
Is an aircraft cockpit a poorly designed ux? It does require a fair bit of learning.
- redwall_hp 10y ago
  Professional means it doesn't sacrifice functionality in favour of making things easy for newbies. This is a philosophy I approve of for all software. Vim is great because it offers power at the expense of having a little bit of a learning curve. A shell gives you unlimited power compare to a stripped down and locked down GUI. GUIs and "UX" are generally antithetical to making a computer do what it does best (automate things instead of creating more busywork).
  - copperx 10y ago
    > GUIs and "UX" are generally antithetical to making a computer do what it does best I agree with you, but although CLIs are explicitly automatable, they are almost never are because most operations are one time deals. If you have evet set up a Linux server I think you'll understand what I mean. The CLI is also a usability nightmare with no discoverability.
    - cestith 10y ago
      I use configuration management tools to set up multiple nearly identical Linux servers with nearly identical configurations. It's totally repeatable. Look into Ansible, Chef, Puppet, or SaltStack.
  - jomamaxx 10y ago
    "GUIs and "UX" are generally antithetical to making a computer do what it does best (automate things instead of creating more busywork)." Except for helping the 6 or so billion people in their daily lives, but hey, the iPhone would be 'better' if it just had 'bash'? Read your email lately from bash? Didn't think so!
    - terminalcommand 10y ago

k__ 10y ago

Why would someone write a tool for 10 commands?!

tree_of_item 10y ago
No one here did that. What are you talking about?

chowells 10y ago

"Professional" doesn't mean "Poorly designed". It means "designed so that people with lots of domain knowledge and experience with the tool find that it never gets in their way." In that sense, git is a professional tool. If you know everything about it, it doesn't get in your way. The problem is when you don't know everything about it..

snoman 10y ago
The burden of having to know everything about it, is precisely what gets in your way. Granted, I use an actual tool (sourcetree) that abstracts away the BS that is the git commandline. This idea that 'if you don't like the tool, it's because you're not good enough to use it, because you don't know everything about it' is elitist hokum.
slavik81 10y ago
I think this is because the commands are poorly named and badly organised. Professionals will use it frequently enough that they remember everything they need and find it easy from that point forward, but for beginners the unintuitive commands are a double-whammy. It's hard to find the command you want, and the poor naming is a hinderence to building a good mental model of the system.
ubernostrum 10y ago
In this sense, trivially, every tool is a "professional" tool, since if you just rote-memorize every aspect of it you know how to do everything it can do. The problem with git is the lack of coherence in its default UI. Multiple ways to accomplish the same task, git commands which perform incredibly different functions depending on (invisible) context, inability to decide whether commands or flags should act as the highest-level switches... It is simply the case that, no matter how beautifully and cleanly designed git's internals might be, the interface it presents to them has zero conceptual integrity.
- Nursie 10y ago
  No, trivially, there can be tools that you know inside out which still present roadblocks to perfectly ordinary tasks and be a bad fit for the domain they operate in. Visual SourceSafe springs to mind here... Git, by comparison, is very flexible and allows you to do an awful lot, when you've learned it. You can learn SourceSafe inside out and still have it be a total pain in the arse.
  - ubernostrum 10y ago
    Again: git as some sort of Platonic ideal of an implementation of a DAG I don't care to argue about. But git's default user interface I will argue about until I'm out of breath, then keep arguing about. Nothing in that interface is designed to aid in learning. Nothing in it is designed so that mastering one task provides discoverability or intuitability of how to perform another task. It is a complex mess of inconsistencies, discontinuities and obscurities which point more to a lack of design or even of someone with authority to perform design than to anything else. It can only be "mastered" through rote memorization, and bears no necessary or useful relationship to the underlying data models and structures whatsoever.
    - Nursie 10y ago
      Eh. Fair enough, my pedant mode just kicked in when you said any tool could be a 'professional' tool in the sense the parent poster said. I have no particular view on how good or bad git's command line is - I have greatly enjoyed using SourceTree though, and the underlying DVCS seemed not to get in the way.

nine_k 10y ago

Is an aircraft cockpit a poorly designed ux? It does require a fair bit of learning.

redwall_hp 10y ago
Professional means it doesn't sacrifice functionality in favour of making things easy for newbies. This is a philosophy I approve of for all software. Vim is great because it offers power at the expense of having a little bit of a learning curve. A shell gives you unlimited power compare to a stripped down and locked down GUI. GUIs and "UX" are generally antithetical to making a computer do what it does best (automate things instead of creating more busywork).
- copperx 10y ago
  > GUIs and "UX" are generally antithetical to making a computer do what it does best I agree with you, but although CLIs are explicitly automatable, they are almost never are because most operations are one time deals. If you have evet set up a Linux server I think you'll understand what I mean. The CLI is also a usability nightmare with no discoverability.
  - cestith 10y ago
    I use configuration management tools to set up multiple nearly identical Linux servers with nearly identical configurations. It's totally repeatable. Look into Ansible, Chef, Puppet, or SaltStack.
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  "GUIs and "UX" are generally antithetical to making a computer do what it does best (automate things instead of creating more busywork)." Except for helping the 6 or so billion people in their daily lives, but hey, the iPhone would be 'better' if it just had 'bash'? Read your email lately from bash? Didn't think so!
  - terminalcommand 10y ago