Hacker News Reader

Comment by hhh | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't consider basic git usage 10x that for most people

Git and HTML both deal with the (let's face it) complicated data structure we all know as trees.

The difference: You can fuck up an HTML tree and most browsers can still display your page[1], you can still get your message across. You fuck up a git history tree and you can somehow summon Cthulhu.

Not to mention, even if you can manage to stay away from branch confusion, just dealing with diffs is already a huge barrier for newbies.

[1] See "Where HTML 'beats' C" - Computerphile https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-csXdj4WVwA

I may be blind to the learning problems since I know git already. But isn't it pretty hard to mess up a git repo if all you do is add+commit? (maybe combined into a "save" button in some UI) Then, asking someone who knows better when you want to do anything more complicated.

To me, just being able to save versions and look at them later (like saves in a video game) is such a huge boon that any of the more complicated features don't even need to be touched for git to be worth it.

I’ve helped teach a couple of those full stack web development boot camps a few years ago and you’d be surprised how many things you’d consider difficult to mess up that others will find impossibly difficult to grasp. Perfectly intelligent, rational people suddenly don’t know how to type a command i said like 10 seconds ago.

You can learn enough HTML to make a website without even properly understanding what files and directories are, let alone how to use a terminal.

And with Neocities, you also don’t need to understand what it means for files to be “local” or “on a server” because you just get a textarea that you can type your HTML into. (until you get to stuff like using your own images that is)

To do “basic git usage” you need to pretty deeply grok all of that before you can even begin to learn git itself. Just to publish a website!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com