Hacker News Reader

Comment by pradn | Hacker News Reader

Git is too complicated. It's barely usable for daily tasks. Look at how many people have to Google for basic things like uncommitting a commit, or cleaning your local repo to mirror a remote one. Complexity is a liability. Mercurial has a nicer interface. And now I see the real simplicity of non-distributed source control systems. I have never actually needed to work in a distributed manner, just client-server. I have never sent a patch to another dev to patch into their local repo or whatnot. All this complexity seems like a solution chasing after a problem - at least for most developers. What works for Linux isn't necessary for most teams.

View on HN

> Git is too complicated. It's barely usable for daily tasks. Look at how many people have to Google for basic things like uncommitting a commit, or cleaning your local repo to mirror a remote one.

Cars are too complicated. They are barely usable for daily tasks. Look at how many people have to Google for basic things like changing a fan belt, or fixing cylinder head gasket.

You can fill in almost anything here. Most tools are complicated. Yet yo don’t need to know their ins and outs for them to be useful to you.

To me it sounds like you're proving the exact opposite. I'd assume most car owners never need to change a fan belt themselves, while everyone who uses git daily needed at some point to revert a commit. "How to turn right" isn't huge on stackoverflow last time I checked...

Git is used prolifically in the tech industry. What on earth are you talking about?

Being needlessly complicated seldomly stops the tech industry from using something as long as the complexity is slightly out of the way.

"Barely usable for daily tasks"

Is a pretty strong statement, especially given many tech companies use it exactly for this purpose.

Git might have a learning curve, and sure, it's not the simplest. But "barely usable" is hyperbole in the face of actual evidence.

I'm not defending Git specifically ; other SVNs are just as viable. The quoted statement seems a bit ridiculous.

To me there’s some irony in that all insta-criticism of Git in responses to my comment presumably applies to a project that describes itself as “Git for data” and promises exact reproduction of all Git command behaviour—therefore suffering from the same shortcomings.

Doit boasts its likeness to Git as a feature. Does this mean it’ll also be barely usable for daily tasks? Is it possible for a project to faithfully reproduce the entirety of Git command interface and be less complicated than Git / not suffer from the same shortcomings?

I personally think Git isn’t that bad, once it’s understood. It could be counter-intuitive sometimes though (as an example, for the longest time I used Git without realizing it stores a snapshot of each file and diffs/deltas are only computed when required). Just trying to be pragmatic and not expecting a tool like Git to be entirely free of leaky abstractions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com