4 ms·

Oh no. Not on your life. It would be better for the entire world if Linus had a heart attack rather than rewriting Make. Make is already unusable; git-style mak

by tedks 13y ago

Oh no. Not on your life. It would be better for the entire world if Linus had a heart attack rather than rewriting Make. Make is already unusable; git-style make would be an abomination. Can you even imagine reading the man pages of all the different git-make commands? The syntax? I hope Linus keeps contributing to humanity and doing what he's doing. He's obviously a great engineer, and if he works hard, he might undo the wrong of releasing git into the world.

taeric 13y ago
Huh? Since the comparison would be to the likes of svn and cvs, git is a hella good improvement. If you are willing to learn what it is that it does, git is actually fairly frigg'n good. Of course, mayhap I've just not used a better tool.
lytol 13y ago
> he might undo the wrong of releasing git into the world I've never seen a comment with which I more vehemently disagree.
jeffreyrogers 13y ago
I can't tell if you're joking or not. The popularity of GitHub and its position as the defacto modern source control management tool demonstrate that very few people hold your point of view. Sure, Git has a lot of options, but what do you need to actually be productive with Git? Probably only a handful of commands: git clone, git pull, git push, git commit, git add, git checkout, git branch, git log. And not too much more than that. At my university Git is used in every single lab based CS course and I don't know of a single person who has had trouble learning to use it.
- scotth 13y ago
  One of the main criticisms of git has been its user interface (which to be fair, has improved considerably over time). People often compare it to Mercurial's, unfavourably.
- tedks 13y ago
  No, it demonstrates that things that the Linux kernel adopts tend to get adopted. That isn't very surprising. Git being faster than the dVCS's of the time probably helped. Popularity doesn't equate to quality. QWERTY is still the default keyboard layout. I am willing to bet money (let's say 0.1 bitcoins) that there are plenty of people at your university who have trouble with Git. We can haggle on terms, but I'd bet that you'd see 10 people at least struggling with git in an intro course. Once you learn to give it the right incantations, and learn never to deviate from the path you know, any tool can become usable. But it will never be a part of you and will never make you stronger. This has crippled a generation of developers and I'm afraid it will be a massive barrier to entry, stunting humanity's growth probably by 10-20 years. See http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~asampson/blog/git.html http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~asampson/blog/git.html for a more in-depth treatment of Git's insanity.
  - XorNot 13y ago
    QWERTY exists because alternatives were not objectively better. Everytime anyone proposed an alternative, they had to not just be a little better, they had to be so much better that a lifetime of QWERTY muscle-memory being undone was justified. It's the same reason so many new display technologies have failed: its not good enough to be better then an LCD eventually. You need to be better now, and better then the LCD which will come about as evolutionary improvements in manufacturing too. Being a little cheaper in the initial plant cost is meaningless if the plant has been built and we understand its processes. Which of course is why the commentary on Git is absurd: people struggle with Git? People struggled with CVS. People struggle with the notion of "files" and programming in general. The alternative has to both exist, and be easier to use from the get-go. Not just a different set of traps.
  - reality_czech 13y ago
    Relax. Deep breath. At some level, command-line conventions are arbitrary. "ls" could just as easily be "dir" or "list." "revert" could just as easily be "checkout" in some contexts. UNIX has never been a zero-learning-curve OS. That's OK. There are other operating systems that fill that role. git is a UNIX tool which is intuitive once you learn it. The world doesn't owe you anything, and if you don't want to learn git, or any aspect of programming, nobody is forcing you to. There are lots of other things to do out there. Some of them even pay more.
joe_the_user 13y ago
Hah ha, The parent quote doesn't deserve to be downvoted but it seems to have been massively downvoted for the same reason a massive number of people use GIT who shouldn't - the bandwagon effect. Git may well be a perfect tool for the Linux kernel but it's still an opaque nightmare for the many average non-kernel-developers who use it as "the new good version control system" (which it isn't, it's only a tool for a specific purpose made by a famous person). The poster's point is valid - if Linus created a make replacement for his purposes, the effects of everyone else inappropriately adopting it would be horrific (even if it was indeed, a great make for the kernel and just for the kernel).

by tedks 13y ago

taeric 13y ago

Huh? Since the comparison would be to the likes of svn and cvs, git is a hella good improvement. If you are willing to learn what it is that it does, git is actually fairly frigg'n good. Of course, mayhap I've just not used a better tool.

lytol 13y ago

> he might undo the wrong of releasing git into the world I've never seen a comment with which I more vehemently disagree.

jeffreyrogers 13y ago

I can't tell if you're joking or not. The popularity of GitHub and its position as the defacto modern source control management tool demonstrate that very few people hold your point of view. Sure, Git has a lot of options, but what do you need to actually be productive with Git? Probably only a handful of commands: git clone, git pull, git push, git commit, git add, git checkout, git branch, git log. And not too much more than that. At my university Git is used in every single lab based CS course and I don't know of a single person who has had trouble learning to use it.

scotth 13y ago
One of the main criticisms of git has been its user interface (which to be fair, has improved considerably over time). People often compare it to Mercurial's, unfavourably.
tedks 13y ago
No, it demonstrates that things that the Linux kernel adopts tend to get adopted. That isn't very surprising. Git being faster than the dVCS's of the time probably helped. Popularity doesn't equate to quality. QWERTY is still the default keyboard layout. I am willing to bet money (let's say 0.1 bitcoins) that there are plenty of people at your university who have trouble with Git. We can haggle on terms, but I'd bet that you'd see 10 people at least struggling with git in an intro course. Once you learn to give it the right incantations, and learn never to deviate from the path you know, any tool can become usable. But it will never be a part of you and will never make you stronger. This has crippled a generation of developers and I'm afraid it will be a massive barrier to entry, stunting humanity's growth probably by 10-20 years. See http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~asampson/blog/git.html http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~asampson/blog/git.html for a more in-depth treatment of Git's insanity.
- XorNot 13y ago
  QWERTY exists because alternatives were not objectively better. Everytime anyone proposed an alternative, they had to not just be a little better, they had to be so much better that a lifetime of QWERTY muscle-memory being undone was justified. It's the same reason so many new display technologies have failed: its not good enough to be better then an LCD eventually. You need to be better now, and better then the LCD which will come about as evolutionary improvements in manufacturing too. Being a little cheaper in the initial plant cost is meaningless if the plant has been built and we understand its processes. Which of course is why the commentary on Git is absurd: people struggle with Git? People struggled with CVS. People struggle with the notion of "files" and programming in general. The alternative has to both exist, and be easier to use from the get-go. Not just a different set of traps.
- reality_czech 13y ago
  Relax. Deep breath. At some level, command-line conventions are arbitrary. "ls" could just as easily be "dir" or "list." "revert" could just as easily be "checkout" in some contexts. UNIX has never been a zero-learning-curve OS. That's OK. There are other operating systems that fill that role. git is a UNIX tool which is intuitive once you learn it. The world doesn't owe you anything, and if you don't want to learn git, or any aspect of programming, nobody is forcing you to. There are lots of other things to do out there. Some of them even pay more.

joe_the_user 13y ago

Hah ha, The parent quote doesn't deserve to be downvoted but it seems to have been massively downvoted for the same reason a massive number of people use GIT who shouldn't - the bandwagon effect. Git may well be a perfect tool for the Linux kernel but it's still an opaque nightmare for the many average non-kernel-developers who use it as "the new good version control system" (which it isn't, it's only a tool for a specific purpose made by a famous person). The poster's point is valid - if Linus created a make replacement for his purposes, the effects of everyone else inappropriately adopting it would be horrific (even if it was indeed, a great make for the kernel and just for the kernel).