I'm definitely diving off into an OT area here but I'm going to bite anyway. "For example, I really don't see why 'git commit -a -m "turd"' is pioneering while

I'm definitely diving off into an OT area here but I'm going to bite anyway. "For example, I really don't see why 'git commit -a -m "turd"' is pioneering while right-click, Commit, check boxes, enter "turd", click "Ok" is not." I agree with you, if the GUI you're talking about is some wonderful Git GUI and you like it, awesome. I got the impression from the post that this author isn't impressed by people using Git at all: "I’m scared of Git and Subversion." I think that's what the grandparent was talking about regarding the frontiers. Git (and Hg, and Darcs, and Bazaar...) is on the frontier, and this means that it's a bit rough and ready. But a lot of people find it productive and useful and the benefits outweigh the costs of reading manpages to find argument flags. That's kind of how I feel about Git GUIs, since many of them are still rough and ready, and just aren't as powerful as the CLI (see TortoiseGit, where you cannot interact with the index, and the Eclipse plugin, which doesn't support submodules and makes some infuriating decisions about how to manage more than one Eclipse project inside a Git repo). But if you're more productive with a GUI than the Git CLI, great! I just get the feeling that the OP isn't interested in better tools for the sake of better tools, which is a bit disingenuous since Opera and the web and all the great stuff he talks about wouldn't have been possible if we were still using punch cards.