7 ms·

> I believe the core issue is devs like above never take the time to “grok” Git I believe the same, and it's not just a problem you see with git, it's all over

> I believe the core issue is devs like above never take the time to “grok” Git I believe the same, and it's not just a problem you see with git, it's all over the place. Some developers seems eager to use something so they just skim the documentation in order to do the least amount of reading and understanding in order to implement something, but often miss some fundamental detail and have to jump back. Or, they fundamentally misunderstand the tool at all, but push forward with their own idea what the tool is, rather than stepping back and start learning again.

wpietri 4y ago
You say that like it's bad, but that's just life. We're trying to fit a whole universe into 3 pounds of meat. If we stopped to truly understand anything before taking action, we'd never get anywhere. That's especially true in technology, where whole armies of people are working to complicate things as fast as possible. For the best of reasons, of course. But when I started out, I could read one short book and have a pretty good understanding of my computer's processor, and from there it wasn't much further to understanding the whole computer. Now I could spend days just understanding, say, processor cache strategies [1]. A field that is super interesting, but if I am to get any of my actual work done, I can't afford to dig into that and the many, many other similar subtopics. I'm going to get a casual understanding of something, do my best to make something useful, and only dig in further when I'm forced to. When I do have to dig in, it comes in two cases for me. One is where there is something necessary complexity that I would have to learn about regardless. E.g., if something is too slow, I need to learn about what happens under the hood to do proper performance tuning. Great, fine, I will learn it. But then there's the other bucket, which includes unnecessary complexity, bad abstractions, poorly considered UX, and the like. For me, git is clearly in that bucket. I intentionally have very simple development flows. Git can do a great deal, 98% of which I not only don't need, I actively don't want. [2] So I'm going do my best to remain ignorant of its inner workings, stick with my small number of commands, and very occasionally refer to "Oh Shit, Git!?!" [3] And I'm perfectly happy with that until it gets replaced with a technology that better matches the domain. [1] e.g.: https://chipsandcheese.com/2022/05/21/igpu-cache-setups-compared-including-m1/ https://chipsandcheese.com/2022/05/21/igpu-cache-setups-comp... [2] An example of what I don't want: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRpPPuKf/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRpPPuKf/ [3] https://ohshitgit.com/ https://ohshitgit.com/
pdimitar 4y ago
I'm very happy to fundamentally misunderstand GIT's internals because I want to do a finite (and small) set of operations with it, not HOW it operates under the covers. Conflating the two, like you do, is elitism. "If you just stopped and read to understand...", a-ha, sure, I'll do that for every one of the no less than 500 tools I've used over the course of my career and will never get anything done on time. There's no time. We got real work to do and no we can't switch to a company that gives us this time. There's a big world outside the Silicon Valley. GIT is a huge UX failure and seeing people pretend otherwise makes me question my -- or their -- sanity.
- counttheforks 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - pdimitar 4y ago
    The only one complaining here is you. Also this is not Reddit, chill.
    - counttheforks 4y ago
      You can either learn the tools of the trade, or you can go online and complain about how your hammer is too hard to use and so you refuse to hold it right. How is that not complaining?
      - maccard 4y ago
        That's not a good analogy. A better analogy is someone telling you that you need to understand material sciences to be able to use an impact driver properly.
        counttheforks 4y ago
        Can you learn material sciences in an afternoon of minimal effort?
counttheforks 4y ago
It's insane to me how many developers simply refuse to read documentation or spend any time at all learning the new tools they're supposed to use.
- howinteresting 4y ago
  This is all Stockholm syndrome. Git has a lot of random accidental complexity, from reset and checkout doing too many things (yes I'm aware of switch and restore), to stacks being a pain to work with. The idea that you're supposed to just be in the middle of an interactive rebase most of the time is mind-boggling. A better thing to say is "yeah we've been saddled with this horrible tool, yeah we know it sucks, but it'll suck a bit less when you learn it. Oh and sorry if you're not a professional developer and have to use git, I hope we can do better next time."
  - counttheforks 4y ago
    Yes, we all know it has some rough edges and could be more convenient. Unless someone actually makes that idyllic more convenient tool and it becomes widespread, none of that matters. We're stuck with the hammer that everyone else is using. No sense refusing to learn how to use it just because you're stubborn, everyone else managed just fine.
    - bornfreddy 4y ago
      Well no, that's not the case. In fact many projects (gitless for example) clearly show that a consistent UI for git is possible, but unless git developers decide to rework the tool completely, we are stuck with what we have. And no, using a 3rd party tool and convincing every team that gitless is better is simply not going to happen. The way out is for someone to swallow their pride, admit they did a half-assed job and fix it. Not holding my breath though. I say that as someone who uses git daily, who has learned git internals, who uses cli almost exclusively, who helps the teammates out of their git problems and who still hates the cli inconsistencies.
- charlie0 4y ago
lumb63 4y ago
I've seen this phenomenon as well. I've noticed a few factors that I hypothesize contribute to this: 1) Making Computer Science programs in universities overly simple. When I was in college, I tutored students in CS. When I started college, the CS 101 course was taught in Java, and when I finished, it was being taught in Python. There was an immense gap between the understanding of the Python-first vs. Java-first students. The Java-first students understood fundamental concepts like arrays, passing parameters by reference vs. by value, "OOP" concepts, and other common paradigms in languages. The Python-first students would use "lists" and "dictionaries" for many problems without understanding that those structures impacted the time complexity of their solutions, or that they used memory allocation, reallocation, hashing, etc. Python is great for hacking together a non-fault-tolerant program that does X as quickly as possible, but I saw it damage the way the students thought about computing. It made the students think it ought to be easy. It made them think that they should be able to write, in nearly plain English, what they wanted the computer to do, and that it ought to do it. It made them think they should be able to intuitively be able to code without spending any amount of time learning the craft, and that they could do anything an advanced programmer could do by typing a few lines of simple code. They were less willing to accept that sometimes problems are hard, sometimes they would have to think, and sometimes they would have to write more than a for loop to solve problems. The Java students' problem sets covered implementation of data structures and complex applications, while the Python students struggled to put together even the implementation. For a humorous and broader explanation of this subject, see James Mickens' excellent article The Night Watch [0]. For example: "That being said, if you find yourself drinking a martini and writing programs in garbage-collected, object-oriented Esperanto, be aware that the only reason that the Esperanto runtime works is because there are systems people who have exchanged any hope of losing their virginity for the exciting opportunity to think about hex numbers and their relationships with the operating system, the hardware, and ancient blood rituals that Bjarne Stroustrup performed at Stonehenge." 2) Bad documentation, and bad users of documentation. I dislike documentation that neglects how the tool works and instead creates a cookbook that its users can copy verbatim. It has similar effects to what I described above. Developers that use this type of documentation find themselves helpless when they encounter a problem they've not memorized the solution to. I think it also creates a learned helplessness wherein users cannot question the model the tool uses or think outside that model to solve complex problems. I prefer documentation that teaches the ethos of the subject in question so that I can understand better and imagine new solutions. I've also heard the complaint that Git's documentation is awful; some say that it is only useful if you know already know where what you are looking for is, and useless if not. In other words, it lacks an "apropos" (aka "man -k") equivalent. This is my gripe with "wiki" style documentation. It is scattered and unsearchable and has no cohesion. We as developers need to do a better job creating documentation that is searchable, coherent, and useful to new and experienced users alike. Various sections of documentation should have ample cross-references to help users understand the connection between parts of the system to help them form a mental model of how tooling works. [0]: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf

wpietri 4y ago

You say that like it's bad, but that's just life. We're trying to fit a whole universe into 3 pounds of meat. If we stopped to truly understand anything before taking action, we'd never get anywhere. That's especially true in technology, where whole armies of people are working to complicate things as fast as possible. For the best of reasons, of course. But when I started out, I could read one short book and have a pretty good understanding of my computer's processor, and from there it wasn't much further to understanding the whole computer. Now I could spend days just understanding, say, processor cache strategies [1]. A field that is super interesting, but if I am to get any of my actual work done, I can't afford to dig into that and the many, many other similar subtopics. I'm going to get a casual understanding of something, do my best to make something useful, and only dig in further when I'm forced to. When I do have to dig in, it comes in two cases for me. One is where there is something necessary complexity that I would have to learn about regardless. E.g., if something is too slow, I need to learn about what happens under the hood to do proper performance tuning. Great, fine, I will learn it. But then there's the other bucket, which includes unnecessary complexity, bad abstractions, poorly considered UX, and the like. For me, git is clearly in that bucket. I intentionally have very simple development flows. Git can do a great deal, 98% of which I not only don't need, I actively don't want. [2] So I'm going do my best to remain ignorant of its inner workings, stick with my small number of commands, and very occasionally refer to "Oh Shit, Git!?!" [3] And I'm perfectly happy with that until it gets replaced with a technology that better matches the domain. [1] e.g.: https://chipsandcheese.com/2022/05/21/igpu-cache-setups-compared-including-m1/ https://chipsandcheese.com/2022/05/21/igpu-cache-setups-comp... [2] An example of what I don't want: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRpPPuKf/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRpPPuKf/ [3] https://ohshitgit.com/ https://ohshitgit.com/

pdimitar 4y ago

I'm very happy to fundamentally misunderstand GIT's internals because I want to do a finite (and small) set of operations with it, not HOW it operates under the covers. Conflating the two, like you do, is elitism. "If you just stopped and read to understand...", a-ha, sure, I'll do that for every one of the no less than 500 tools I've used over the course of my career and will never get anything done on time. There's no time. We got real work to do and no we can't switch to a company that gives us this time. There's a big world outside the Silicon Valley. GIT is a huge UX failure and seeing people pretend otherwise makes me question my -- or their -- sanity.

counttheforks 4y ago
[flagged]
- pdimitar 4y ago
  The only one complaining here is you. Also this is not Reddit, chill.
  - counttheforks 4y ago
    You can either learn the tools of the trade, or you can go online and complain about how your hammer is too hard to use and so you refuse to hold it right. How is that not complaining?
    - maccard 4y ago
      That's not a good analogy. A better analogy is someone telling you that you need to understand material sciences to be able to use an impact driver properly.
      - counttheforks 4y ago
        Can you learn material sciences in an afternoon of minimal effort?

counttheforks 4y ago

It's insane to me how many developers simply refuse to read documentation or spend any time at all learning the new tools they're supposed to use.

howinteresting 4y ago
This is all Stockholm syndrome. Git has a lot of random accidental complexity, from reset and checkout doing too many things (yes I'm aware of switch and restore), to stacks being a pain to work with. The idea that you're supposed to just be in the middle of an interactive rebase most of the time is mind-boggling. A better thing to say is "yeah we've been saddled with this horrible tool, yeah we know it sucks, but it'll suck a bit less when you learn it. Oh and sorry if you're not a professional developer and have to use git, I hope we can do better next time."
- counttheforks 4y ago
  Yes, we all know it has some rough edges and could be more convenient. Unless someone actually makes that idyllic more convenient tool and it becomes widespread, none of that matters. We're stuck with the hammer that everyone else is using. No sense refusing to learn how to use it just because you're stubborn, everyone else managed just fine.
  - bornfreddy 4y ago
    Well no, that's not the case. In fact many projects (gitless for example) clearly show that a consistent UI for git is possible, but unless git developers decide to rework the tool completely, we are stuck with what we have. And no, using a 3rd party tool and convincing every team that gitless is better is simply not going to happen. The way out is for someone to swallow their pride, admit they did a half-assed job and fix it. Not holding my breath though. I say that as someone who uses git daily, who has learned git internals, who uses cli almost exclusively, who helps the teammates out of their git problems and who still hates the cli inconsistencies.
charlie0 4y ago

lumb63 4y ago

I've seen this phenomenon as well. I've noticed a few factors that I hypothesize contribute to this: 1) Making Computer Science programs in universities overly simple. When I was in college, I tutored students in CS. When I started college, the CS 101 course was taught in Java, and when I finished, it was being taught in Python. There was an immense gap between the understanding of the Python-first vs. Java-first students. The Java-first students understood fundamental concepts like arrays, passing parameters by reference vs. by value, "OOP" concepts, and other common paradigms in languages. The Python-first students would use "lists" and "dictionaries" for many problems without understanding that those structures impacted the time complexity of their solutions, or that they used memory allocation, reallocation, hashing, etc. Python is great for hacking together a non-fault-tolerant program that does X as quickly as possible, but I saw it damage the way the students thought about computing. It made the students think it ought to be easy. It made them think that they should be able to write, in nearly plain English, what they wanted the computer to do, and that it ought to do it. It made them think they should be able to intuitively be able to code without spending any amount of time learning the craft, and that they could do anything an advanced programmer could do by typing a few lines of simple code. They were less willing to accept that sometimes problems are hard, sometimes they would have to think, and sometimes they would have to write more than a for loop to solve problems. The Java students' problem sets covered implementation of data structures and complex applications, while the Python students struggled to put together even the implementation. For a humorous and broader explanation of this subject, see James Mickens' excellent article The Night Watch [0]. For example: "That being said, if you find yourself drinking a martini and writing programs in garbage-collected, object-oriented Esperanto, be aware that the only reason that the Esperanto runtime works is because there are systems people who have exchanged any hope of losing their virginity for the exciting opportunity to think about hex numbers and their relationships with the operating system, the hardware, and ancient blood rituals that Bjarne Stroustrup performed at Stonehenge." 2) Bad documentation, and bad users of documentation. I dislike documentation that neglects how the tool works and instead creates a cookbook that its users can copy verbatim. It has similar effects to what I described above. Developers that use this type of documentation find themselves helpless when they encounter a problem they've not memorized the solution to. I think it also creates a learned helplessness wherein users cannot question the model the tool uses or think outside that model to solve complex problems. I prefer documentation that teaches the ethos of the subject in question so that I can understand better and imagine new solutions. I've also heard the complaint that Git's documentation is awful; some say that it is only useful if you know already know where what you are looking for is, and useless if not. In other words, it lacks an "apropos" (aka "man -k") equivalent. This is my gripe with "wiki" style documentation. It is scattered and unsearchable and has no cohesion. We as developers need to do a better job creating documentation that is searchable, coherent, and useful to new and experienced users alike. Various sections of documentation should have ample cross-references to help users understand the connection between parts of the system to help them form a mental model of how tooling works. [0]: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf