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This is the same argument that suggests Squarespace is better than HTML & CSS. Maybe true for some people - but not the typical HN audience, I imagine. You use

This is the same argument that suggests Squarespace is better than HTML & CSS. Maybe true for some people - but not the typical HN audience, I imagine. You use git all day, every day. It's worth it to learn it inside and out, and the design assumes users who are willing to make that investment. If you assume everyone learns the primitives, then the rest of git's design makes sense as an organic evolution of that. And for anyone who doesn't know the primitives, I posted a brief summary on Mastodon the other day: https://cmpwn.com/@sir/102038690003388821 https://cmpwn.com/@sir/102038690003388821 Also recommend Pro Git's chapter on git internals.

Espressosaurus 7y ago
Nah. It's a UI issue. Even when you know the primitives, the counterintuitive randomness of what is a command vs. what is a switch on a different command vs. something that can be done in three different ways using different combinations of commands and switches makes it a clusterfuck to interface with until you memorize everything. Contrast to something like mercurial where once you know the concept, you either know how to do it, or you know the command that will give you the help for how to do it. It's generally not going to be some switch on an unrelated command because the UI was actually designed and not simply cobbled together.
eterm 7y ago
This isn't HTML & CSS vs squarespace, and to butcher the analogy this is more like CSS vs Sass/SCSS. CSS is the internal API which does everything but Sass is an API which exposes that in a much more beautiful way. I don't need to know how postgres does paging, indexing, tree diffs, etc to be able to write good SQL. I don't need to know how typescript compiles to javascript to use typescipt. I don't need to know how my engine works to drive my car. I use all of those every day. But the suggestion here is that as every day users of git should learn git internals to be able to use the tool better. That's a tooling failure. It's not a failure of the git design or git fundamentals, it's a failure of the git cli.

Espressosaurus 7y ago

Nah. It's a UI issue. Even when you know the primitives, the counterintuitive randomness of what is a command vs. what is a switch on a different command vs. something that can be done in three different ways using different combinations of commands and switches makes it a clusterfuck to interface with until you memorize everything. Contrast to something like mercurial where once you know the concept, you either know how to do it, or you know the command that will give you the help for how to do it. It's generally not going to be some switch on an unrelated command because the UI was actually designed and not simply cobbled together.

eterm 7y ago

This isn't HTML & CSS vs squarespace, and to butcher the analogy this is more like CSS vs Sass/SCSS. CSS is the internal API which does everything but Sass is an API which exposes that in a much more beautiful way. I don't need to know how postgres does paging, indexing, tree diffs, etc to be able to write good SQL. I don't need to know how typescript compiles to javascript to use typescipt. I don't need to know how my engine works to drive my car. I use all of those every day. But the suggestion here is that as every day users of git should learn git internals to be able to use the tool better. That's a tooling failure. It's not a failure of the git design or git fundamentals, it's a failure of the git cli.