Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

I compare it to 10-15 years ago, when functional programming was rather rare. Mid-level OO programmers would complain it was confusing and unfamilar, whereas in reality has beautiful and simple concepts.

Git's use of a DAG is confusing and unfamilar for many programmers, though in reality it's beautiful and simple.

View on HN

The DAG is the easy part. I can understand perfectly well what I want to do with the DAG and have no idea how to get git to DO it.

Pretty much this. Fortunately the command you need is usually a quick Google search away, and a sequence of basic invocations of branch, checkout, merge, rebase and commit are usually enough to transform the DAG however you want, even if there are simpler ways to do it.

> The DAG is the easy part.

Excellent. I responded to the comment that claimed "deep problems in its conceptual design".

> have no idea how to get git to DO it.

Yes, the ergonomics of git could be significantly better. Branches vs tags, manipulating local refs vs remote refs, etc.

Is OO simple ?

It is supposed to be, but I am not sure it delivers on that part. That’s another discussion, but for instance I wouldn’t bet on having a random 10 yo kid understand OO beyond the bare Cats and Dogs tutorial everyone goes through at first.

And that’s what I would say about git as well. Even after knowing the internals and how it is supposed to work, I still feel that for a tool it’s pretty unelegant and puts a significant burden on the user to know what needs to be done in what situations.

Yup, second that. My old boss introduced the whole team to Scala and made us attend a weekly tutorial as part of training/team-building. Since then, I try to write stateless functions, methods and objects as much as possible regardless of language or platform.

Git is quite elegant if one has a good grasp of graph theory.

Git is certainly great technically. But one should not need to know graph theory to source control files. And I believe that any version control system that does not follow the convention (that probably predates Linus' existence on Earth) that commit should actually commit changes to server, is, by definition, more4 hard to use than it has any reason to be.

But this might be a good study in why Linux is not taking over the desktop, and unlikely to do so in foreseeable future.

> But one should not need to know graph theory to source control files.

You have two pills. Or you know few basic DAG concepts, or you need to know a lot of "semantic" VCS commands.

Usually, VCS commands makes some sense (i.e. commit commits), which isn't always the case with Git. THere are only two version control systems where I ever needed to use commands, rather than being able to do what I need in GUI -- SVN (because it is crap and would corrupt repository all the time, and then you needed to fix it up by hand) and Git, because... well, because Git.

I worked with cvs, perforce, clear case, svn and mercurial before git. And each system force me to learn new concepts and a new set of commands. There is no one universal set. There is no surprise your vcs skills are not transfered to git. And no, some inferior wrapper like subj doesn't help you. It's always better to learn tool.

But checkin had always did the same thing, be it in VSS or PVCS. Sure, there'd be varying capabilities, differences in tooling, but concepts were the same. Git wants to be different for the sake of being different (even if we assume for a moment that one should know anything about DAGs in order to use version control, which is pretty laughable by itself).

> But checkin had always did the same thing

I bet you have no problem in remembering what git pull, git checkout, git add, git commit and git push do, isn't it? For everyday work it's enough. You have problem in mastering git, all these nifty logs, diffs, indexes, refs, heads, remotes and other stuff. Other VCS have complex concepts too besides checkins.

It's not even remembering whatever non-standard terminology Linus came up with (although when I am feeling particularly curmudgeony I don't even want to know what push is, and why doing a commit isn't enough). It's a) having to deal with it in the first place, because the management decided to cargo-cult it, even though we are not developing anything resembling Linux kernel (there were no issues using TFS before, they just decided that they want to give Microsoft even more money and got a commercial Github account), and b) that I even have to drop to the CLI in the first place for operations that in any other VCS I could do with a couple clicks right in VS GUI. With TFS I had to use command line maybe once a year, and usually for something not strictly necessary. With SVN it was maybe every c9ouple of weeks to fix up the repository it messed up, With Git it is way too often.

Whatever technical advantages of Git are (and technically it is good), I think it fails as a tool to let me do my job easier.

>I believe that any version control system that does not follow the convention (that probably predates Linus' existence on Earth) that commit should actually commit changes to server, is, by definition, more4 hard to use than it has any reason to be.

This is just 'your use-case is wrong'.

> Git's use of a DAG is confusing and unfamilar for many programmers, though in reality it's beautiful and simple.

The difference relative to functional programming is that you get paid for one and the other is just a tool

I would argue that functional programming is just a tool as well... Programmers are paid for solving problems and code is just a means to that end.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com