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There has been a lot of push to commoditize software engineering. Unfortunately that has resulted in a swarm of people who want developer salaries without the w

by dolni 3y ago

There has been a lot of push to commoditize software engineering. Unfortunately that has resulted in a swarm of people who want developer salaries without the work or expertise. Git definitely has some warts but you are right. It is an industry tool for expert, professional use. Some complexity is inherent to the problem of version control. Learning how to use your tools is part of ANY trade.

tester756 3y ago
>It is an industry tool for expert, professional use. If you were talking about things like Kubernetes, LLVM, Ghidra then I'd agree. But no git. This is not some expert tool. This tool's purpose is literally to manage your characters' history, that's it. Git could be used by any other profession that deals with letters - article writers, book writers, etc, etc.
- allarm 3y ago
  > This tool's purpose is literally to manage your characters' history, that's it. Yes, but you seem to heavily underestimate the complexity of the problem and the volume of the use cases that git solves.
janalsncm 3y ago
I disagree. There’s always more that can be learned about anything but we live in a world with finite time and finite resources. So you can either devote time to learning git or you could spend it doing the actual work. The fact that git is used by experts and professionals is not an excuse for poor UX. The experts and professionals are almost never Git experts or professionals. I use my car every day, that doesn’t make me a mechanic. Having to understand the inner workings of a tool is an indication of poor design, not a gatekeep we should seek to maintain.
- dolni 3y ago
  I think there are two things being conflated here. One is: how do you effectively manage changes to a codebase over time? Git has a model that, for day-to-day use, has primitives like "commit", "branch", and "tag". You also have to understand the difference between your working copy, what is staged for commit, and any other commit in history. These, in combination with the operations you can do with them is actually somewhat complex. This is the thing I am saying people need to learn. And people quite often complain about it. The other is the organization of git's porcelain layer, the arguments and flags each subcommand takes, and how stuff is presented back to the user. I think git stands to make significant improvement here. Be that as it may, the tool exists as it is. So your options are to use a different VCS entirely, use a different frontend, or learn how to use git as-is. If you choose to use git but deliberately avoid learning e.g. what a rebase is and why it's useful, you are choosing to be an ineffective developer. Could it be better in some ways? Yes, but it isn't. I don't think the car analogy is particularly compelling. The "primitives" of a car are already much simpler than git's. The fundamental primitives of a car are "go faster" and "go slower", along with some supporting things like managing your headlights, windshield defrosting, wipers, and horn. While additional tools are being added to cars to make them safer (e.g. a backup cam or collision detection), the complexity of those tools is increasing rapidly which makes them more prone to failure. And a driver is absolutely not excused from causing an accident just because one of these safety tools failed. You still have to know how to safely operate your vehicle in a variety of conditions.
- aulin 3y ago
  I often heard this argument from people learning LaTeX in academia. It's difficult and I don't have time to study it. From people that spent years to master advanced maths, people that spent years to learn how to build and operate state of the art experimental setups. But for some reason there's never time to learn your software tools.

by dolni 3y ago

tester756 3y ago

>It is an industry tool for expert, professional use. If you were talking about things like Kubernetes, LLVM, Ghidra then I'd agree. But no git. This is not some expert tool. This tool's purpose is literally to manage your characters' history, that's it. Git could be used by any other profession that deals with letters - article writers, book writers, etc, etc.

allarm 3y ago
> This tool's purpose is literally to manage your characters' history, that's it. Yes, but you seem to heavily underestimate the complexity of the problem and the volume of the use cases that git solves.

janalsncm 3y ago

I disagree. There’s always more that can be learned about anything but we live in a world with finite time and finite resources. So you can either devote time to learning git or you could spend it doing the actual work. The fact that git is used by experts and professionals is not an excuse for poor UX. The experts and professionals are almost never Git experts or professionals. I use my car every day, that doesn’t make me a mechanic. Having to understand the inner workings of a tool is an indication of poor design, not a gatekeep we should seek to maintain.

dolni 3y ago
I think there are two things being conflated here. One is: how do you effectively manage changes to a codebase over time? Git has a model that, for day-to-day use, has primitives like "commit", "branch", and "tag". You also have to understand the difference between your working copy, what is staged for commit, and any other commit in history. These, in combination with the operations you can do with them is actually somewhat complex. This is the thing I am saying people need to learn. And people quite often complain about it. The other is the organization of git's porcelain layer, the arguments and flags each subcommand takes, and how stuff is presented back to the user. I think git stands to make significant improvement here. Be that as it may, the tool exists as it is. So your options are to use a different VCS entirely, use a different frontend, or learn how to use git as-is. If you choose to use git but deliberately avoid learning e.g. what a rebase is and why it's useful, you are choosing to be an ineffective developer. Could it be better in some ways? Yes, but it isn't. I don't think the car analogy is particularly compelling. The "primitives" of a car are already much simpler than git's. The fundamental primitives of a car are "go faster" and "go slower", along with some supporting things like managing your headlights, windshield defrosting, wipers, and horn. While additional tools are being added to cars to make them safer (e.g. a backup cam or collision detection), the complexity of those tools is increasing rapidly which makes them more prone to failure. And a driver is absolutely not excused from causing an accident just because one of these safety tools failed. You still have to know how to safely operate your vehicle in a variety of conditions.
aulin 3y ago
I often heard this argument from people learning LaTeX in academia. It's difficult and I don't have time to study it. From people that spent years to master advanced maths, people that spent years to learn how to build and operate state of the art experimental setups. But for some reason there's never time to learn your software tools.