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It's incredulous how people can find git daunting; especially the simple usage most make of it. Yet, I constantly see people refer to such simple and easy to us
by erikbye 9y ago
It's incredulous how people can find git daunting; especially the simple usage most make of it. Yet, I constantly see people refer to such simple and easy to use CLI tools as an obstactle in CS courses, not a helpful tool. Welcome to the fulfilled prophecy of the movie Idiocracy. This is why MIT had to stop teaching SICP and why many courses uses Java instead of C... Good luck learning pointers and assembly then. Good luck ever knowing how to create and manipulate data structures, how to create a filesystem, database, OS, scheduler, etc; or how to develop/improve and implement algorithms used in ML and AI (to be fair, this is math... and which is why programmers need to stop avoiding math, it's another issue, but related. stop avoiding complexity, because it's a fucking big and scary monster lurking beneath everything you're working with, just waiting in the dark...)
What we need is people who understand the complexity we constantly throw more shit on top of; it's only going to get worse the more data points and networking we have to deal with. Pretty soon we're going to have a massive network of autonomous vehicles on physical, country-spanning networks of roads. For this we need systems people. Not front-end developers. The sad thing is that most programmers are absolutely useless when shit hits the fan.
- kutkloon7 9y agoI'm not saying git is a useless tool. I simply think that if a course expects more than common knowledge of the tool, it should teach it too. You can't expect someone without git experience to fix broken repository. Furthermore, I think that there are too many tools programmers are expected to know, and git is one of those. Git is a nice tool, but I don't think that 'real programmers know git' is true per definition. Above all, git is a TOOL; and one could use SVN or mercurial to achieve the same in most circumstances (of course sometimes SVN is an inferior choice, because it's not distributed). I agree with the rest of the post though. There are reasons to prefer C above other programming languages. However, I think the best approach would be to learn the C-style and learn multiple similar languages, to be aware of the differences.