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Comment by tempest_ | Hacker News Reader

Honestly the picture shown in that thread are fine and most people I have met grok those commands really quick.

The issue is git's interface is terrible and very powerful. Which means when something goes awry and they land outside those 5 or 6 commands they often have no idea how to fix it. Which invariably leads to a copy paste of their changes and a delete and re-clone.

Honestly I really like mercurial. I found its interface better but in this day and age all the tooling is built around git so ...

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> ..when something goes awry and they land outside those 5 or 6 commands..

Yes, this. I have no problem adding, rm-ing, branching, making and accepting PRs, etc. These are what the overwhelming majority of git for dummies tutorials cover. (I've even paid for a very well-known and well-reviewed course and completed it.) And, these photos upthread are fantastic for that initial git-101 progression.

Then, I eventually landed my first tech-sector job and still haven't picked up much more since. My solution to every ounce of apprehension is deleting and re-cloning out of paralysis and fear.

I find great difficulty in being able to glean a repository's "environment" in a sense analogous to gleaning the environment of an initially compromised machine (the foothold) when you've popped a fresh shell on a boot2root box. (I thank the digital gods for IppSec and his hands-on videos that teach you how to clear up the fog of war around you!)

> My solution to every ounce of apprehension is deleting and re-cloning out of paralysis and fear.

Having worked with older version control systems, I found that to be one of the best things about git. If I had a problem with a version control system like AccuRev, that sort of simple fix was not possible. Your every action resulted in a change of the server state, so if you got your workspace into a confusing state, the confusion would be synced to every machine.

These days I understand git well enough that I can fix just about any mistake, but the 'delete and start over' workflow was extremely valuable to me as a beginner. Knowing that there was a foolproof fallback of just deleting and recloning let me experiment without fear.

The other day Jujutsu featured on HN, with git as a possible back-end. Describing itself as "both simple and powerful" with a combination of practices adopted from multiple tools:

> Jujutsu is a Git-compatible DVCS. It combines features from Git (data model, speed), Mercurial (anonymous branching, simple CLI free from "the index", revsets, powerful history-rewriting), and Pijul/Darcs (first-class conflicts), with features not found in most of them (working-copy-as-a-commit, undo functionality, automatic rebase, safe replication via rsync, Dropbox, or distributed file system).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36952796

> The issue is git's interface is terrible and very powerful.

Git is basically that a programming language. The time you need to "master" git is comparable to "master" a programming language.

I'm being writing code for more than half of my lifetime so far, and every time I need to use an unusual git command I feel like a script kiddo who copies and pastes from SO.

> Git is basically that a programming language.

“git is like a terrible programming language” doesn’t change the criticism one bit.

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