3 ms·

Agreed. I consider myself pretty competent at git (consistently helping out the rest of my team of ~15 people with it) and even then I've shot myself in the foo

by AlexSW 5y ago

Agreed. I consider myself pretty competent at git (consistently helping out the rest of my team of ~15 people with it) and even then I've shot myself in the foot using `git checkout --` instead of `git reset` before to unstage a file, and lost all of my work on it. Really felt that should have given a warning.

cerved 5y ago
use git stash instead to unstage changes not committed to the index and you'll never lose anything ever again
- unknown_error 5y ago
  The point is that you shouldn't have to learn everything by brutal trial and error, losing hours of work each time you try to learn a new operation and make a small mistake. It's the same reason consumer operating systems have a trash can and undo features. Just railing on people with "you should've known better" doesn't really help.
  - still_grokking 5y ago
    Well, reading the fucking manual BEFORE you touch a machine is a very good idea. Otherwise the machine may rip out your limbs, or worse. The manufacturer of the machine won't be responsible for sure if you didn't even read the manual… Clear case. That's reality in engineering. If developers want to call themself "engineers" they should behave as such. On the other side you don't let people without special training even close to industrial machines! The risk they could get killed by an accident is just to high. Here lies the discrepancy actually: "Software industry" is as much an industry as running a kindergarten is. Also there is the most time no "engineering" at all in "software engineering"… Just trail and error until "something works" (or at least looks on the surface like it would, no matter how broken it is on the inside). As long as people are supposed to "learn on the job", and there are no clear quality / security standards in this "industry", and stuff is called "engineering" even no true engineering approaches are followed, nothing will change. Machines will continue to kill people in completely avoidable accidents (virtually)… But that's in my opinion a fully homemade misery actually.
    - unknown_error 5y ago
      Y'know, for some of us peasants, dev work can just be a way out of poverty. We don't have engineering degrees from a top school, we don't work for the FANGs, and we don't work on mission-critical code. The software industry has expanded a lot since the 80s, and now hobbyists can and do make a living out of it even without formal training. So what? When I started web dev, I earned $15/hr. Beat the $8/hr I was making before that in landscaping. Now I make a little more than that, which still isn't much. My clients/employers don't pay crazy wages and they don't expect crazy quality work. They know they get what they pay for, and it works out for both parties. Maybe's OK to have shitty, mediocre code for 90% of the world's needs... a small biz website, with the ecommerce/PCI bits outsourced? Sure, why not. It mostly works, and if it goes down for a few hours a year, maybe that doesn't meet super-reliability standards (can we count 8s instead of 9s?) but it gets the job done well enough? Shrug. Sure, proper engineer techniques matter for certain applications. I would never want to touch industrial machines, or medical, or space, or automobiles... anything that could blow up and/or kill someone. But most code out there is just for some local, small-scale use, mostly temporary anyhow and bound to obsolete in a few years if not months. There will always be mediocre businesses needing mediocre devs for mediocre pay, just as there will be elite enterprises that require the world's smartest people. Problem is, git was designed by the super smart for the super smart, great engineering with terrible UX. And it was kinda just trickled down to the rest of us, and it feels a bit like trying to teach Mom to use DOS and edit config.sys just to play a game. Now consumer software UX has leaped forward by decades and it shows, but a lot of the command-line dev tools are still incredibly arcane. They don't have to be, but it's not a priority to fix/improve their UX because, I suppose, it's engineers who are proud of their engineering, not proud of their ability to dumb it down for the rest of us. I don't blame them, I just know I can't meaningfully contribute to git (the project) because I'm not smart enough, well trained enough, whatever, and that complaints would fall on deaf ears like yours. It's an altogether different culture. Elitist by design, or meritocratic if you will. And believe or not, I've probably spent more time learning git -- reading documentation, diagramming it out with coworkers, cloning repos and experimenting with commands, etc., following a shit-ton of tutorials -- than any other skill I've ever had to learn. It was quicker to learn Perl and regex than mid-level git. If you want to pay for the world's would-be engineers to receive all the training to go from mere dev to proper "software engineers", by all means please do. But otherwise, well... you know what? World's gonna keep producing mediocrity. Most of us are just average.
- AlexSW 5y ago
  A bit late but for what it's worth I'm very familiar with `git stash` and use it all the time, and it's not clear how this helps my situation of aiming for one command and accidentally doing a very similar one but one which deletes work with no warning. For example, `git commit --` is a completely moronic way of deleting files, and I am baffled it took them so long to add aliases for it which have a coherent name.

by AlexSW 5y ago

cerved 5y ago

use git stash instead to unstage changes not committed to the index and you'll never lose anything ever again

unknown_error 5y ago
The point is that you shouldn't have to learn everything by brutal trial and error, losing hours of work each time you try to learn a new operation and make a small mistake. It's the same reason consumer operating systems have a trash can and undo features. Just railing on people with "you should've known better" doesn't really help.
- still_grokking 5y ago
  Well, reading the fucking manual BEFORE you touch a machine is a very good idea. Otherwise the machine may rip out your limbs, or worse. The manufacturer of the machine won't be responsible for sure if you didn't even read the manual… Clear case. That's reality in engineering. If developers want to call themself "engineers" they should behave as such. On the other side you don't let people without special training even close to industrial machines! The risk they could get killed by an accident is just to high. Here lies the discrepancy actually: "Software industry" is as much an industry as running a kindergarten is. Also there is the most time no "engineering" at all in "software engineering"… Just trail and error until "something works" (or at least looks on the surface like it would, no matter how broken it is on the inside). As long as people are supposed to "learn on the job", and there are no clear quality / security standards in this "industry", and stuff is called "engineering" even no true engineering approaches are followed, nothing will change. Machines will continue to kill people in completely avoidable accidents (virtually)… But that's in my opinion a fully homemade misery actually.
  - unknown_error 5y ago
    Y'know, for some of us peasants, dev work can just be a way out of poverty. We don't have engineering degrees from a top school, we don't work for the FANGs, and we don't work on mission-critical code. The software industry has expanded a lot since the 80s, and now hobbyists can and do make a living out of it even without formal training. So what? When I started web dev, I earned $15/hr. Beat the $8/hr I was making before that in landscaping. Now I make a little more than that, which still isn't much. My clients/employers don't pay crazy wages and they don't expect crazy quality work. They know they get what they pay for, and it works out for both parties. Maybe's OK to have shitty, mediocre code for 90% of the world's needs... a small biz website, with the ecommerce/PCI bits outsourced? Sure, why not. It mostly works, and if it goes down for a few hours a year, maybe that doesn't meet super-reliability standards (can we count 8s instead of 9s?) but it gets the job done well enough? Shrug. Sure, proper engineer techniques matter for certain applications. I would never want to touch industrial machines, or medical, or space, or automobiles... anything that could blow up and/or kill someone. But most code out there is just for some local, small-scale use, mostly temporary anyhow and bound to obsolete in a few years if not months. There will always be mediocre businesses needing mediocre devs for mediocre pay, just as there will be elite enterprises that require the world's smartest people. Problem is, git was designed by the super smart for the super smart, great engineering with terrible UX. And it was kinda just trickled down to the rest of us, and it feels a bit like trying to teach Mom to use DOS and edit config.sys just to play a game. Now consumer software UX has leaped forward by decades and it shows, but a lot of the command-line dev tools are still incredibly arcane. They don't have to be, but it's not a priority to fix/improve their UX because, I suppose, it's engineers who are proud of their engineering, not proud of their ability to dumb it down for the rest of us. I don't blame them, I just know I can't meaningfully contribute to git (the project) because I'm not smart enough, well trained enough, whatever, and that complaints would fall on deaf ears like yours. It's an altogether different culture. Elitist by design, or meritocratic if you will. And believe or not, I've probably spent more time learning git -- reading documentation, diagramming it out with coworkers, cloning repos and experimenting with commands, etc., following a shit-ton of tutorials -- than any other skill I've ever had to learn. It was quicker to learn Perl and regex than mid-level git. If you want to pay for the world's would-be engineers to receive all the training to go from mere dev to proper "software engineers", by all means please do. But otherwise, well... you know what? World's gonna keep producing mediocrity. Most of us are just average.
AlexSW 5y ago
A bit late but for what it's worth I'm very familiar with `git stash` and use it all the time, and it's not clear how this helps my situation of aiming for one command and accidentally doing a very similar one but one which deletes work with no warning. For example, `git commit --` is a completely moronic way of deleting files, and I am baffled it took them so long to add aliases for it which have a coherent name.