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Comment by Shacklz | Hacker News Reader

I had the same experience for a long time and then I took a bit of time to have a deeper look behind the curtain and I have to say, once you grasp the data-model of git itself (a branch is a pointer to a commit, a commit is a pointer with metadata to a tree, a tree is...), many of the commands start to make sense all of a sudden, or at the very least "stop looking dangerous".

As it's one of those rare tools that's probably meant to stay for quite some time and we interact with quite frequently, it was time well spent for me, and it turns out it's really not as hard as the scary-looking commands imply.

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This generic statements can be said about basically any technology (MS MFC anybody? (L)DAP? IBM Websphere studio J2EE abominations?) if you are smart enough / have enough time to dig around. It doesn't help discussion at all (and plenty of folks complain about git all the time), since one can't avoid being branded as lazy/stupid if its not grokking this uber important yet trivial tool like me (TM).

But then there is Mercurial, used it decade and a half ago and it contained literally everything good about distributed model I could ever wish for, with maybe 50% of Git's complexity. Yet cargo-culting gonna cargo-cult, if Linus uses it so must we since we are not subpar and the rest be damned.

Yes sure its the tool to stay, and eventually can be learned well. But its design is far, very far from the most important software design principle (KISS).

> But its design is far, very far from the most important software design principle (KISS)

My suggestion was more to look at the underlying data-model, which really isn't that much harder to grasp than what your average undergrad datastructure course teaches. Git really does solve a rather complex problem in a quite elegant way - it just so happens that the packaging around it (the cli) is indeed a bit more controversial.

I can only speak for myself but once I started to look at git less like "a tool" and rather from a perspective of datastructure/algorithms etc. (which are inherently agnostic to how they're implemented), it started to make sense to me rather quick (a matter of hours actually, which is nothing compared to the countless of hours I've already wasted trying to find the right cheat-sheet-incantation before).

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