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I have a real question (not trying to start a flame war). Truthfully, why do people think git is hard? Seriously, as programmers we do many, many things that
by kemiller2002 6y ago
I have a real question (not trying to start a flame war). Truthfully, why do people think git is hard? Seriously, as programmers we do many, many things that are really hard. Things like thinking about abstract data structures, understanding concurrent processing, etc. I can understand not knowing it and how that frustrates people, but I genuinely don't understand why people are afraid to just dig in and learn git. Some of the commands I admit are confusing at times, and I have to look commands up, but I don't think I've ever looked at git and said, this too difficult for me to understand.
Honestly, I would really love to know, because I have to teach git fundamentals in a couple of months at work.
- bulatb 6y agoGit is hard because it has no client. It's a set of primitives for building one. The "client" is your knowledge of its data model, mental mapping of obtusely named commands and flags to things you want to do, and ability to visualize/predict the outcome. This isn't clear to learners because git manipulates a flowchart with a CLI—a graphical activity misrepresented and disserved by its nongraphical interface. It isn't obvious they need to do the work themselves the software could be doing for them, or that they're working at a different level of abstraction than they think. Teaching the model first, before the commands or anything else, can prevent a lot of confusion.