Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by saila | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

saila·

I really don't think git reset --hard should be at the top of a list of git commands intended for beginners.

View on HN

Yes, knowing “just enough to be dangerous” is a thing and this article just doused it with gasoline.

and yet is one of the most useful commands for fixing mistakes made by beginners . . .

Though it would probably be better to tell beginners to run git stash save first. Then they wouldn't lose changes they made to the files before running a hard reset.

Ideally disable force pushes on master branches of a repo to prevent people who screw up to also also break upstream. You can still lose some work, but at least not the complete repo.

Beginners use this command all of the time when they back themselves against a wall and can’t get out. It’s nice to have an escape ladder when you’re beginning.

The alternative for a beginner is rm -rf repo && git clone repo

How is that better?

"Someone told me git reset --hard. Oh shit!!! My extant work is all gone!"

"Hmm, how to start from scratch? I guess I could save a few files, delete the workspace with good old trusty rm -rf, clone again, and restore those few files."

If you can't see the difference between those two...

Yes, the Git power user will know how to "start from scratch" without really starting from scratch and without losing extant work they'd rather save. And beginner users can do the second of the above. But teach a beginner to use git reset --hard and they'll hate Git and they'll hate you.

OK, good point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com