Comment by whitfieldsdad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by whitfieldsdad | Hacker News Reader

This has proven to be an extremely controversial topic, but, in my opinion, it's perfectly okay to use git in college or university, and we should encourage, not discourage people from using technologies like distributed version control software.

You could substitute git with WhatsApp, Google Drive, or e-mail for small projects, and get by just fine, but, why not spend 15 minutes learning the basics of git?

As far as I know, the use of git and other distributed version control software is very popular, and we don't see the same hesitation when adopting technologies like Google Docs and its collaborative editing features in college or university.

Is distributed version control software truly a controversial technology?

If distributed version control software is not suitable for use in college and university, what would be a more appropriate technology?

The university could even setup their own private self-hosted Gitlab and use it as part of assignment submission.

10 years ago, my no-name college had a CS degree that required us all to take a "Software Engineering" course that covered the fundamentals needed once you graduated, including Git. We did group-style large coding projects where teams had to submit their GitHub repo at the end.

The prof was able to review who committed what and then hammered us on good commit messages, clean coding style, testing, etc.. I feel that a large part of my career success was due to the early start I had from that course.

I think that this would be a great idea, and could also help combat students not doing anything in group projects.

I lone wolfed most of my group projects in college, and don't have any regrets, but, of the projects that I didn't loan wolf, most people didn't write a single line of code, or only contributed in relatively inconsequential ways.

I think that adopting distributed version control systems in higher education would be mostly good.

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