Git in layman's terms: isomorphic contours in source-code phase space | Hacker News Reader

Git in layman's terms: isomorphic contours in source-code phase space

tartley.com

107 pointsisomorph20 comments

Is it wrong that I'm disappointed because this doesn't seem to make much sense? The actual topology involved has to be discrete, not continuous, as can never continuously deform from one branch to another.

Also, a tree of trees is still a tree. Git repositories form DAGs of trees, and this is not really that hard to visualize.

I too was really disappointed that this is nonsense instead of just very useless but correct. It downgrades it from smart and clever joking to "guy with a technical dictionary" joking.

Nevertheless, for the audience that have no technical understanding of technology, it's equally funny either way. Which is no doubt why it's possible to build a Visual Basic UI for forensic analysis in a few hours.

I no longer undetstand what Git is after reading this.

This is not true. You now understand topology.

Guys, please. This isn't an analogy, it's satire. He's angry at how terrible he thinks the git manuals are.

Hey. OP here. This comment is the closest to my actual motivation for producing the post, although me and my co-author that afternoon were not so much angry about it as just 'delirious with laughter'.

The git manuals aren't fun because the git porcelain isn't fun. A better command-line interface would be simpler to explain.

Best obscure joke/satire thus far in December :)

Brilliantly well done trolling.

Poe's Law strikes again. Half the commentators don't get the joke.

Perhaps you could let us in on the joke?

In short: git isn't anywhere near as complicated as some seem to think?

This very complex "simple" explanation of Git is funny because Git is rumored to have a steep learning curve, and the Git documentation is very heavy on theory and models.

It is also a bit funny because a lot of educated readers will try to make sense of the explanation, but the explanation is utter nonsense and has nothing to do with how Git works.

You left a layer of the joke: in order to be sure that the explanation is nonsense, you have to understand mathematical concepts that are much more complicated than git's architecture.

This reminds me a lot of turbo/retroencabulator [1]. After you've watched the video (don't go first or it will spoil it), you can check out the wikipedia article.[2]

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXJKdh1KZ0w

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turboencabulator

The best analogy I've used in explaining Git to my non-tech friends is that "it's like kind of like photoshop layers"

It's definitely not complete but gets them to appreciate it.

I liked this conceptual introduction: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~cduan/technical/git/

Doh!

Makes sense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com