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Comment by wyclif | Hacker News Reader

Almost everybody I've ever worked with who complained about Git has a conversation with a coworker that goes something like this:

Coworker: "I really hate Git, it's so hard to understand what's going on internally."

Git guy: "Did you read the documentation?"

Coworker: "Nope."

Git guy: "Did you read Git - book?"

Coworker: "Nope."

Git guy: "Did you read Scott Chacon's 'Pro Git'?"

Coworker: "Nope."

Git guy: "..."

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That conversation already went off the tracks at "internally", since it shouldn't matter at all how it works internally. We do not learn how most things work in detail, because we wouldn't have time to live our life if we did.

In this particular case, git is a version control tool and it supports various typical operations for such tools. One should be able to learn the commands and then successfully use the tool. If that's not possible, I continue to assert that there's a problem with the tool.

The likelihood for this conversation to occur, in a way, also depends on the tool itself, and tells us something about it.

As a matter of fact, git is hard to use.

The question is: keeping the same level of functionality, could it have been made easy to use?

It also speaks about the quality of users as a whole - we somehow forgot to RTFM at all or lead people to documentations, simultaneously accepting lack of documentation in a vicious cycle.

And the answer is: yes, absolutely. Mercurial is a whole level better. Unfortunately git won - because of GitHub, not on technical merit.

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