> I think a lot of devs have the attitude that a tool being more difficult to use makes it a powerful one (cf. Vim/Emacs), whereas most people are happy when to

> I think a lot of devs have the attitude that a tool being more difficult to use makes it a powerful one (cf. Vim/Emacs), whereas most people are happy when tool does the three things they need to get from a=>b, b=>c, a=>c. While I agree that there are those who take pride in how spartan tools they use, it's not correct to make blanket judgements about the whole suite of hackerware. Emacs, for instance, is not difficult to use, it is a different computing environment, which, when you get hold of it, can boost your productivity. I've written many little programs in it that I use every day which I'd never be able to write in other languages because a) I need to know at least one GUI framework and many other libraries, b) no other environment has the same use-hack-eval-use development experience, and c) the way you create GUIs in Emacs is so effective (mixture of special-mode, plain text and text with properties attached; all buffer-manipulation commands come in to your app out of nowhere, gratis) that one can set sth. working in their first hacking session, and then on improve their tools while using it, all interactive, whereas in all other GUI frameworks you're left alone with widgets and a dev cycle that's nearly always approximately write-compile-debug-compile. Git, instead, is a plain tool for one purpose with an arcane user interface. I believe the patch theory school of VCS tools (e.g. darcs) will overtake in future when they'll smooth out their rough edges as they provide a very intuitive way to work with code as a series of related changes.