What the JJ developer seam to misunderstand is, that the index and stashes are a feature to improve the users workflow. You can bypass the index with commit -a, giving you JJ behaviour and you can commit just fine instead of using the stash. The stash is like some backlog of temporary commits and also supports saving the index separately. When you don't care about this, you don't need to use it, these features are purely additive.
In fact, the most popular jj workflow is closer to the git add -p workflow than it is git commit -a. I’d argue more jj developers work this way than git developers do in git, even.
> backlog of temporary commits
So a list somewhere else, which commits are considered temporary. It's a todo list for commits. Does JJ have that?
> We've unified two things into one thing.
A stash in Git is also just two commits. So no you just removed a feature on top of that. That feature might not be to your taste, or even outright confusing, but you did remove it.
The git features of stashing/staging are removed, but they're superfluous given how jj works. You don't need or want them, and keeping them around would only give people two ways to do the same things.
> give people two ways to do the same
This is where I am disagreeing. I do want them.
for, while and goto achieve the same and are the same thing under the hood, yet they convey different semantic and you choose between them for different tasks, because they are more suited for different things.
stashes and commits achieve the same and are the same thing under the hood (both are commits), yet they convey different semantic and I choose between them for different tasks, because they are more suited for different things.
All in software is about different abstractions, that all fundamentally do the same thing.
> but it's all easier in jj
You can literally use commits instead of stashes in Git and guess what: it's the same as treating any other commit. Here JJ and Git are the same. You can also do stashes in Git, when you want temporary commits that are put into a "todo" list.
I think for me, the unification of concepts, and simplification of DX, wins out. I like being able to use the same set of commands for all three. I didn't miss staging or stashes at all when I switched.
There's no loss of speed, functionality or power, and as a bonus, instead of maintaining 3 separate concepts and commands, they're now handled by 1.
It's honestly much simpler. A git stash is effectively a commit already, but stored weirdly, doesn't show up in the logs by default, and with its own ad hoc commands.