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Comment by 3chelon | Hacker News Reader

Because I fell out with Jetbrains over their pricing model :)

Also, in school they have some pretty serious restrictions on what they can access. And git might be a bit hard for a kid to learn.

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There's a free Educational version of PyCharm (for both three major platforms): https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm-edu/download/

All their IDEs are free for students who "have access to their student email address or a valid ISIC card" by the way: https://www.jetbrains.com/student/

Edit: link added

Thanks for that, I'll look into it.

Yes, I'm using the free community edition (2016.1 at present). Also I said "github", when doing school type exercises for a Coursera course I uploaded stuff to a gist on GitHub (https://gist.github.com/) to work on in breaks at work - just simply 20 line max programs, any text dump would be equivalent for how I was using it. PyCharm of course can integrate with git but I only use that locally.

https://repl.it/languages/Python/ helped me out, as did http://www.pythontutor.com/visualize.html.

Do you think learning git is harder than learning how to program?

No, but I think it's unnecessary noise and let's face it, git will be ancient history 10 years from now so kids should focus on learning fundamental concepts rather than a particular tool that's fashionable now.

How is git unnecessary and unfashionable noise?

What do you propose will replace the tool a decent chunk of people use to work on large software projects together?

Ten years ago everybody used SVN, it's not unreasonable to assume that git will be replaced by something else.

Git is now 11 years old. What up and coming VCS was developed last year to replace git? VCS development moves relatively slowly* and git will still be a major player in 10 years.

Though in 10 years I suspect the porcelain and workflows will have collected several new features.

* Git in fact rose in popularity unusually fast. But this was probably because it was born at the intersection of two major events - DVCS were the hot new field and wide open for new players, and the kernel's VCS crisis. I imagine that hosting the kernel on day one would provide as much experience as a decade of being a small experimental VCS. This is not a routine combination of events.

What @adrianN said. Some other version control system.

In fact, on the subject of fundamental stuff... when I first started out, version control was a drawer full of audio cassette tapes that I cycled through, overwriting old tapes with new versions! Collaborative working? The postal service.

So yeah, things move on, but they will continue to move and although git is pretty elegant, it has rough edges and a fiendish CLI interface that very few people fully understand, so I think there is plenty of room for improvement.

Git might be ancient history but version control will never disappear.

Absolutely right. Git will not last forever. We've already had had VCS, SourceSafe, Perforce, SVN...

Although it might last a long time in it's own niche. Perforce is definitely still alive and kicking in the games industry. Git might eventually return to just being the VCS of choice for the linux kernel.

Heh, I still use RCS on a semi-regular basis...

I think it's less fun to learn than programming. Which can be a deterrent for kids or anyone learning programming at the same time (which is hard enough without adding on git).

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