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I think git is not easy to use, and the proof of that is that at least once a month there is a "how to use git" tutorial on the front-page of HN. I'm not sayin

I think git is not easy to use, and the proof of that is that at least once a month there is a "how to use git" tutorial on the front-page of HN. I'm not saying git is a totally bad system, but I disagree with people who think git is easy to use. You don't see thousands of tutorials on the web, and tutorials hitting the HN frontpage on "How to use Subversion", "My personal Subversion workflow", "My .bashrc file containing my aliases for Subversion". I assert the reason is, that they are not necessary (and not, for example, that nobody uses Subversion, or nobody who reads HN uses Subversion.)

danneu 15y ago
I think tutorials just follow what's hot and what people are using, not necessarily what people have trouble understanding. Git is central to HN as a community, so we upvote things like git articles, and other HNers are more likely to try to learn git because of exposure. Coding projects on HN generally link to a github repository. Someone might create a new git cheatsheet tomorrow, but it doesn't indicate that nobody can understand any of the other git cheatsheets you can find in a google query. See, we also incessantly upvote the latest oneword.js "gimmick", and it'd be inaccurate to assume that these javascript weekend projects fill any sort of demand half the time just because they're so prevalent. I think the community just tends to circulate things that it uses and has an interest in.
zak_mc_kracken 15y ago
> I think git is not easy to use, and the proof of that is that at least once a month there is a "how to use git" tutorial on the front-page of HN. The command line is hard to learn, and there is no real way to learn it besides... well, learning it by heart, quirks and all. A bit like learning a foreign language. After a while, you don't notice it any more and you realize how powerful and pleasant git really is. Here is an article that captures these thoughts fairly well: http://beust.com/weblog/2010/04/06/git-for-the-nervous-developer/ http://beust.com/weblog/2010/04/06/git-for-the-nervous-devel...
petercooper 15y ago
There were a lot of articles of that sort around back when SVN was interesting and people were bothering to learn it in large numbers. HN wasn't around then, of course, but I remember it sweeping through the Ruby community at the time. SVN has had its wave of tutorials and hype (usually comparing it favorably to CVS at the time). Git's wave still seems to be roaring. When the next system comes out, we'll see tutorials for that every couple of weeks too and Git will be where SVN is now.

danneu 15y ago

I think tutorials just follow what's hot and what people are using, not necessarily what people have trouble understanding. Git is central to HN as a community, so we upvote things like git articles, and other HNers are more likely to try to learn git because of exposure. Coding projects on HN generally link to a github repository. Someone might create a new git cheatsheet tomorrow, but it doesn't indicate that nobody can understand any of the other git cheatsheets you can find in a google query. See, we also incessantly upvote the latest oneword.js "gimmick", and it'd be inaccurate to assume that these javascript weekend projects fill any sort of demand half the time just because they're so prevalent. I think the community just tends to circulate things that it uses and has an interest in.

zak_mc_kracken 15y ago

> I think git is not easy to use, and the proof of that is that at least once a month there is a "how to use git" tutorial on the front-page of HN. The command line is hard to learn, and there is no real way to learn it besides... well, learning it by heart, quirks and all. A bit like learning a foreign language. After a while, you don't notice it any more and you realize how powerful and pleasant git really is. Here is an article that captures these thoughts fairly well: http://beust.com/weblog/2010/04/06/git-for-the-nervous-developer/ http://beust.com/weblog/2010/04/06/git-for-the-nervous-devel...

petercooper 15y ago

There were a lot of articles of that sort around back when SVN was interesting and people were bothering to learn it in large numbers. HN wasn't around then, of course, but I remember it sweeping through the Ruby community at the time. SVN has had its wave of tutorials and hype (usually comparing it favorably to CVS at the time). Git's wave still seems to be roaring. When the next system comes out, we'll see tutorials for that every couple of weeks too and Git will be where SVN is now.