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Comment by greenthrow | Hacker News Reader

Git is not that complicated. If you can't grok git I am seriously concerned about your ability to be an effective software engineer.

Edit: I had assumed the OP was one of the many people I have met who have a Tech Lead title but are not really very technical due to the grandiose request to deprecate checkout. But looking into the blog more I realize that instead the author is more new in their career and I don't mean to be as harsh to someone in that position. Instead to them I would say; when you encoutner something established you don't understand, take it as an opportunity to learn. Git isn't beyond you, it won't take as long to fully understand as you think.

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As the article explains, the problem with this attitude is that Git is increasingly used by people who aren't software engineers and don't want to be.

(Also, tools for software engineers still benefit from clarity and focus of purpose for simple use cases.)

If your non-engineers have to deal with git you have an org or process problem. Git is pretty clear and easy to use to a competent software engineer. I'm tired of this meme that Git is hard. It doesn't get enough pushback.

I disagree that non-engineers should never have to deal with git. This may be true at large organizations, but at startups and labs, many people who are not software developers have to work with of code.

In the biotech startup I worked for, the biologists and the chemists absolutely had to deal with the code that we wrote, that was the only way we could get things done! I think maybe in very large organizations with people to spare, and large departments, and official policies, you can have rules like that. But at smaller places, you have to get scrappy and have everybody work with everything. That involves non-engineers using git!

While I strongly disagree with the conclusion of an org or process problem, I agree that basic concepts are simple and straightwordard. Plus majority (an assumption based on what I've seen) of those users use a GUI tool. GUI makes it simple to work with. A few clicks here and there and you're done. If something goes very wrong, there is usually a collegue who can help using CLI magic

> I agree that basic concepts are simple and straightwordard

I do too and I believe the problem with git is that it's somewhat usable without grasping even these basic concepts - until the day it isn't, as something goes off the beaten path and you just end up getting lost. It also doesn't really nudge you towards understanding as you keep using it; to the contrary - it happily lets you build some suboptimal mental models that are doomed to stop working at some point.

The only way to learn git well right ahead is to sit down and read. It isn't much to learn, but most people just skip this step and go straight to CLI. I can't blame them, I did the same many years ago, so it took me much longer to actually know what I'm doing than it should as well. But the thing is: I didn't know better back then, nobody told me that. Now you (the reader) know, so you have no excuse :)

What do you think the people from the biomedical engineering lab and the physics lab from the article should be doing differently?

Those people usually use GUI for that. They may even not know what CLI is.

If you work on a multi-disciplinary team, the consequence of not making your tools simple enough for others to use, is that you are forced to use other tools, which is why we have to use a horrible mix of sharepoint, teamforge, and github.

Your non-engineers shouldn't have to understand or use git. If they do there's an org or process problem.

> Git is not that complicated. If you can't grok git I am seriously concerned about your ability to be an effective software engineer.

If your hubris is this high, I am seriously concerned about your seniority.

My dude it's not hubris. Git is pretty damn simple compared to many problems you will have to reason about as a software engineer. If you can't understand file versioning, branching and merging then you aren't going to be able to think effectively about much more complicated problems.

If you think it's simple you don't really know it.

It's not that the supposed concepts that are hard, it's that it has one of the messiest interfaces and set of documentation ever devised for a software.

And there are hardly any settled concepts, the terms it used came to be as it was developed, and can have different definitions in different parts of the documentation.

If you consider it simple I'm very seriously concerned about your software engineering output

If git was aimed at regular peope I'd agree it's not well designed. It's not. It's a tool for software engineers to do a job. It is not flawless. But it was massive improvement over the code management tools that were in use before it and I haven't encountered a replacement I prefer.

A lot of the problems people have with git are actually problems with bad workflows. You can argue that git should support arbitrary workflows but that's like arguing a garbage truck should support offroading.

Nope

Software engineers benefit from good tools as well, and having to spend months to get to know a vcs well enough doesn't benefit anyone

Would would be the one good git workflow, in your opinion?

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