Comment by notzorbo3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notzorbo3 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> A well designed ui should be learnable while being used

Strongly disagree with that one. A UI that lets you work in the most efficient way (e.g. vi) can also be well designed, even if it's incredibly difficult to learn.

> creating a fresh learning repo for dedicated learning for fear of losing data while using the tool in your "real" repo is the ultimate red flag in terms of usability.

Again, strongly disagree. Git is a powertool. You don't let loose a powertool if you don't understand how it works. Creating a fresh learning repo is merely acknowledging that you don't know the tool well enough yet. There's nothing wrong with that.

There's a big difference between being noob-friendly and being user-friendly. Personally, I hate noob-friendly tools, because they tend to just get in the way.

> Strongly disagree with that one. A UI that lets you work in the most efficient way (e.g. vi) can also be well designed, even if it's incredibly difficult to learn.

See, I don't think you do disagree. I said a UI should be learnable while being used - vi is. I said nothing about it that learning needing to happen quickly.

I use vim every day; it's not my primary editor, but I'm incredibly comfortable with it, which I wasn't for years after I started using it. But during those years of learning, I never got stuck with an unusable dev environment, I never lost data, I never had to Google how to proceed in order to get my work done. If I ran into a problem, I had the option of opening an alternative editor and continuing with my nice non-corrupted dev env, or I could choose to spend some time figuring out the vim way (and learn something).

vi/vim have no foot guns.

Perhaps this comparison is slightly unfair to git - vi is much simpler insofar as a modal interface is a simpler concept to grok than directed acyclic graphs. So they're not directly comparable, since vi's main barrier to learning is memorising commands and git's is conceptual. However - as has been mentioned elsehwere - hg makes a fine candidate in that regard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com