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Comment by wiremine | Hacker News Reader

> What has git so fundamentally changed that SVN/CVS don't count as knowledge / experience?

I think git (and other distributed source control systems) changed the culture around branching and forking. So, if you're coming from a CVS world, there is a lot of technology that changed, and the technology changed the culture/methodology.

I.e., if you dropped a CVS user from 1996 into today's world, they would have culture shock, not just a new technology to learn.

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It's true! I did a fair bit of programming and other computery things in undergrad and had a pretty good track record for, say, transforming some trash from behind the CS department into a workable computer. I was happy with Emacs, resisted vi, could whip up a nice html page with some cutting-edge CSS 3. By no means did I have special talents but I was sort of up to date on a broad range of basic computer-related skills, from hardware to networks to web design.

But then... I went to grad school in pure math. Seven years later, I emerged from a rip van winkle sleep to a whole new world. Still hand-writing my html, like all mathematicians do, I was astounded to wake up to a world with... frameworks?! AJAX! Rails! widespread use of IDEs, an IDE for every language or taste, Javascript everywhere... Python and Ruby as non-fringe languages....

It was a bit of culture shock and it was fun.

Are we confusing age and culture with stupidity?

A stupid person wouldn't be able to adapt, or might have trouble adapting from one tool to another. That's a stupid person. Likewise a stupid person might think that an organization that was shipping successful products and making money was making a big mistake by not migrating off of svn.

Stupid is stupid, age is a different dimension. "culture" especially regarding tooling like this is sort of a cop-out.

Of course, git was developed by an old guy that used CVS, so....

Replace CVS with BitKeeper, and you'd be right.

Linus never used CVS because he couldn't stand it. The kernel had no version control until BitKeeper came along specifically because Linus wasn't sold on version control until he discovered BitKeeper, and then when McVoy killed their licenses, Linus chose to write his own system because he didn't like any of the existing ones.

I must be getting old

But BitKeeper was created by an old guy (Larry Larry McVoy[1]) who was born in 1962. Not only that, but BitKeeper is built on top of SCCS[2] which predates RCS (and RCS predates CVS).

BitKeeper was a totally new solution to a very old problem that was "solved" years ago. It was created by an "old guy" who knew the wheel had a large flat spot and figured out how to make it round. It was subsequently adopted by another "old guy" (Linus) who refused to use wheels with flat spots.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_McVoy

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Code_Control_System

All source control tools have a different model of the source history. You have to relearn that to change tools.

The culture change mentioned is nothing to do with Git. It has to do with GitHub. We can talk about that too if we want to.

The major concepts are still the same.

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