> Git is not nearly as confusing as people make it out to be.
The people are confused, it's a fact. So it is confusing. Stop gaslighting people.
The people are confused, it's a fact. So it is confusing. Stop gaslighting people.
GP isn’t saying “git isn’t confusing”, they’re saying “git isn’t as confusing as people make it out to be”
The point being, people exaggerate git’s confusingness when discussing it. There’s an element of irrationality here that’s worth bringing up, especially when it comes to comparing it to competing software. Once it has a reputation for being confusing, you’re more likely to be scared of certain workflows, you avoid them, and the problem compounds. Similarly if a VCS has a reputation for being “simple”, people might gravitate to it, learn it first, then parrot conclusions that git is too complicated because they never really gave git a chance in the first place (often they do take the time to read the other VCS’s documentation, and if they would have done the same for git they would have had no problems.)
It doesn’t help that there are so many bad tutorials out there that simply give you what commands to run, and tell you dumb stuff like “just make another clone if you get stuck”, and that makes the problem so much worse, and isn’t git’s fault.
Git is a bit confusing sometimes, but it’s mostly for reasons like “the reset and checkout commands do too much”, and “some low level commands are easy to confuse with high level commands” not because it’s a fundamentally confusing tool.
/r
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[1] many (and I'd include myself here) are fine using the basics, perhaps with some less as-simple-as-possible workflows, but might need to scan the docs if they hit a conflict merging two branches that have developed independently for a fair few commits and have overlaps
Transplant a series of commits onto a different starting point. You can also use git rebase to reorder or combine commits: see INTERACTIVE MODE below for how to do that.
Rebasing interactively means that you have a chance to edit the commits which are rebased. You can reorder the commits, and you can remove them (weeding out bad or otherwise unwanted patches).
Git itself has a glossary[0] of the terms used in the docs.
I don't think this sort of aggression is warranted, as the fact that I find something confusing doesn't directly imply an intrinsic feature of the object that I'm confused with. One can reach that conclusion by observing that, not everyone who learns about the object finds it equally confusing.
All that to say: "The people are confused" doesn't mean that "All people are confused".
If your product has a reputation to confuse users compared to other products, your product confuses users.
Let's not start to bend reality just to back up some narrative because after reading a N hours documentation everything is OK.
If you expect everything to be as easy as pie without needing to make a little effort to read a bit of documentation, then perhaps the problem is not the product but the fact that you are in the wrong industry, or the wrong role within that industry, for you. Have you considered a management track?
Git is intended to make certain patterns possible, and practical. “Easy for people won't read some documentation” was never one of its design goals.
No one said everything should be easy as pie.
There are other software similar to git that have not such reputation. Version control is not new.
I didn't ask why git was widely used. I didn't say git was useless.
Again, there were version controls before git came out.
Yes, there are alternatives that aren't used by anyone except dedicated fans. If they had the wide user base that git enjoyed you'd hear just as many complaints about them.
Classic strawman.
Is your contention that all reputations are deserved, by definition? That’s certainly an interesting take. It leaves zero room for the concept of an “unfair reputation” for example. Maybe you should rethink your argument here.
I could show you thousands of message backing up the confusion.
But you can keep nitpick irrelevant part of messages and pretend you are very smart.
If you made any other elaborations on why you disagree with the post you were arguing against, we'd have something else to discuss. But right now you're just posting shallow dismissals with fallacious arguments. You can do better.
I'll repeat myself, I can show you thousands of messages point out how git is confusing. I can show you plenty of message saying "I used X it was fine, but I used git and it's cumbersome", please show me the same amount of messages telling "I used git it was fine, but I used XXX and it's cumbersome."
I'm also not claiming git isn't confusing (I've explained that it is, in another post), I'm claiming its reputation is undeserved, in that it's not as confusing as people make it out to be. You seem to reject the notion that such a statement is even valid, claiming that reputations are always deserved. I find that to be bullshit.
It's valid to think "yes it has a reputation for being confusing, but much of it is undeserved". It's not black-and-white.
This is not what is written here:
> Git is not nearly as confusing as people make it out to be. They just never take the few hours it takes to understand it. Which is a sad state of affairs for such an essential tool in the belt of any software engineer.
> just does not cut it, if you call yourself a professional.