Hacker News Reader

Comment by not_your_vase | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately knowing DAG's inside out will not save anyone who decides to open man git and related pages. Git is not magic. It's just the dictionary example of what you get when software developers start coding without adult supervision. Lots of cool stuff, but usability and user-friendliness is not one them.

View on HN

I only partially agree. Git is a complex project, developed to help with the management of the Linux kernel source code. Because of that, the original audience was technically very advanced and maybe didn't need any higher layer of abstraction, nor a proper product development roadmap.

The problem appeared when people like I started basing our workflow on it ^_^. There are a few good books[1] and tutorials[2] out there, but I totally agree that the official documentation is only useful as a technical reference.

[1] Mastering Git, https://www.packtpub.com/product/mastering-git/9781783553754 [2] Atlassian Git tutorials, https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials

> It's just the dictionary example of what you get when software developers start coding without adult supervision.

git was originally explicitly a VCS core for anyone to build on. Remember the "plumbing vs porcelain" days? I do.

And after 18 years what have the "adults" done in the meantime? Come at them sideways for having the gall to release an unrefined tool that got popular?

For almost all (99.999999%) intents and purposes git consists of the following commands: pull, push, merge, commit. If you are the mythical 10x developer, the add rebase and submodule to the list. Everything else is just fluff. If you use anything else, it ends only in 2 hours of agonizing googling, with shaking hands before each new commands you run trying to undo whatever arcane stuff you just did.

The core of git is cool. Few simple commands, easy to use. The remaining stuff is something only a mother could love.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com