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To be completely honest it's because git is made by and for hackers. It gives you a lot of rope. If you choose to "git reset --hard" after doing some very important work and not committing, hey, guess what, git won't stop you. Neither will "rm -rf".

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Learned that lesson the hard way ... well, what I had meant was git reset --soft, what I had typed while tired was git reset --hard.

Either way it gave me a chance to re-factor the code, and do it better which ultimately ended up being MUCH better anyway.

This reminds me so much of the UNIX Hater's Handbook, which argues that this attitude ("it's just a rite of passage", "it is better now anyway") is a result of growing up in a world where the design errors of UNIX are seen as features. I don't know yet, but it is an inspiring read nonetheless: http://www.simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf

I've read the UNIX Hater's Handbook a long time ago. I have a hard copy stored in a box somewhere.

I don't quite understand what point you are trying to make though. Ultimately the code loss was my fault, however it ended up much better for the source code I was working on because I had time to think about what had to be done and how I should do it, ultimately leading to less code that ran faster and was much better organised.

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