Comment by rmgraham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rmgraham | Hacker News Reader

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I find that knowing how it works is the only way the commands and flags make any sense. I am constantly seeing people around me fumble through git trying to get by on a handful of commands they've memorized and just live with the fact that they need to re-clone their repo every now and then.

These people scare me. How can they be comfortable not even knowing what they are telling git to do?

I taught myself how the DAG worked, then the low level commands to manipulate it. Now when I read the docs I get nice surprises like pre-built commands for doing the series of operations I plotted out in my head (most recently 'git merge --no-commit' instead of read-tree, update-index, write-tree)...

Oh god, I've become that guy in college who refuses to use a CRC library until he understands the proof.

But seriously, I'm genuinely amazed people can use git at all without understanding it completely. The mnemonics make zero sense without background, and the operations are completely arbitrary looking.

I'm genuinely amazed people can use git at all without understanding it completely. The mnemonics make zero sense without background, and the operations are completely arbitrary looking.

Remember, most things people use every day without understanding them completely. This is a huge barrier to entry and effective use of git; you can't require people to spend weeks learning it before they commit a single line of code. So yes, people learn sets of runes that work, and know that if you step off the path there's no easy way of working out what happened let alone undoing it without blowing away the local copy and going back to the master.

> [...] you can't require people to spend weeks learning it before they commit a single line of code.

But you can expect them to spend two hours to understand the little number of fundamental objects that git works with, and maybe another quarter for basic operations (fetch, push, merge).

The thing is, a lot of git commands are really, really subtle. And almost all of them don't do what you usually want without a couple of switches.

Personally, I'm more of a fan of darcs. It has a really good UI - defaulting to interactive use where it shows you what you're actually doing - and instead of branches you just clone into another folder, reducing a lot of cognitive load around them. It integrates with email as a primary use case - if you have a mailing list and an email client, you have a pretty good replacement for github pull requests.

I only delete everything and start again if I have made the mistake of making any changes to some source code. After a while you learn not to change things.

Lots of projects using git means that I get to spend more time doing things other than coding.

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