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I've started, in this thread, likening it to Plato's Cave - people who are just using git are just seeing/using a blurry facsimile/projection of actual reality/

by nchmy 1y ago

I've started, in this thread, likening it to Plato's Cave - people who are just using git are just seeing/using a blurry facsimile/projection of actual reality/possibilities. It's not a perfect analogy (jj is, I suppose, the projection, and people are chained in the cave), but it makes the point that there could be so much more. The matrix or people happily in a cult would be similar analogies. Perhaps even Stockholm syndrome...

palata 1y ago
This is exactly why it feels like evangelism: "people who don't love jj haven't seen the light/are uninformed/live in the dark age/must be in a cult". That kind of rhetoric makes me want to say "don't tell me I'm stupid if you are the one finding it hard to switch between git branches".
- nchmy 1y ago
  That's fine. Carry on
- stouset 1y ago
  It is evangelism. Unabashedly. I think the Plato’s cave analogy is honestly apt. Git was fine. I used git for ages. I loved its underlying model, and I think it’s brilliant. But it has a lot of sharp edges and a lot of tasks that are painful or frustrating, and people either opt to restrict themselves to a tiny subset to avoid the pain or they carefully curate a workflow that mostly does the job over the course of years. Suddenly within a week of trying a new tool you just… don’t carry any of that any more. It’s like going from GOTOs to structured programming with encapsulated functions. People made many useful programs with GOTO. Some people were more principled than others, but we all got by. But it turns out that functions and loops are a way better mental model for control flow than GOTO. Nobody had to switch and there were plenty of holdouts. But eventually the benefits were impossible to ignore. People like Dijkstra evangelized structured programming because they “saw the light”.
- KingMob 1y ago
  You have a point, but it's more like it's difficult to articulate, than a cult. I think of jj as the ultimate refinement of git. It's not revolutionary, in the sense that there's no must-have feature, but it's a distinct evolutionary upgrade that's just way more pleasant than git. It's telling that most hard-core git gurus are lukewarm on jj at first, but for everyone else, jj makes it way easier to do guru-level version control. Just my $.02, anyway.

by nchmy 1y ago

palata 1y ago

This is exactly why it feels like evangelism: "people who don't love jj haven't seen the light/are uninformed/live in the dark age/must be in a cult". That kind of rhetoric makes me want to say "don't tell me I'm stupid if you are the one finding it hard to switch between git branches".

nchmy 1y ago
That's fine. Carry on
stouset 1y ago
It is evangelism. Unabashedly. I think the Plato’s cave analogy is honestly apt. Git was fine. I used git for ages. I loved its underlying model, and I think it’s brilliant. But it has a lot of sharp edges and a lot of tasks that are painful or frustrating, and people either opt to restrict themselves to a tiny subset to avoid the pain or they carefully curate a workflow that mostly does the job over the course of years. Suddenly within a week of trying a new tool you just… don’t carry any of that any more. It’s like going from GOTOs to structured programming with encapsulated functions. People made many useful programs with GOTO. Some people were more principled than others, but we all got by. But it turns out that functions and loops are a way better mental model for control flow than GOTO. Nobody had to switch and there were plenty of holdouts. But eventually the benefits were impossible to ignore. People like Dijkstra evangelized structured programming because they “saw the light”.
KingMob 1y ago
You have a point, but it's more like it's difficult to articulate, than a cult. I think of jj as the ultimate refinement of git. It's not revolutionary, in the sense that there's no must-have feature, but it's a distinct evolutionary upgrade that's just way more pleasant than git. It's telling that most hard-core git gurus are lukewarm on jj at first, but for everyone else, jj makes it way easier to do guru-level version control. Just my $.02, anyway.