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Isn't "naming things" one of those "hard things" to do well in computer science? It seemed to me, linus and the initial git architects just kind of slapped nam
by throw7 4y ago
Isn't "naming things" one of those "hard things" to do well in computer science?
It seemed to me, linus and the initial git architects just kind of slapped names on operations as features grew organically over top of the model. To early adopters, all of it made sense. Yeah, someone new looking in from the top down will be bewildered.
- dotancohen 4y agoGit reused much of the terminology of other VCS systems, even though the architecture was completely different. So usage-wise git was familiar to someone familiar with e.g. SVN right from the beginning.
- masklinn 4y agoExcept that’s not true because a lot of the commands git reused do something rather to completely different from their role in svn.
- dotancohen 4y agoDifferent internally, but from the perspective of the user the standard commit - checkout workflow is very similar.
- masklinn 4y agoNot at all is the issue. IIRC svn checkout is git’s clone, git’s checkout combines svn’s switch and revert (and possibly update -r? It’s been a very long time)
- masklinn 4y agoThe worst part is that many of the names were inherited from earlier tools, but usually mangled, or repurposed because the old version was “not needed” (revert) because they’d merged multiple high-level features in the same command out of low-level commonalities (checkout and add being poster children for this)