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Comment by stouset | Hacker News Reader

I honestly kind of think your experience is in favor of the GP’s assessment.

Not really. Learning the piano and learning music theory is two different things but tied together. One is skill and muscle memory, the other is theory and understanding. It’s the same with git and version control. One is a process and the other is a tool.

I don't think this framing makes much sense; playing piano isn't a "tool" that you use to achieve some other task, it's literally the goal itself. Using git is not the goal, it's the tool I use to do something else, and needing to learn the underlying theory of how a tool works that's only a small part of how I do my job is not a good user experience.

The goal is to produce music, and such music is generally constrained by music theory. Using git is to version control some software, and version control is dependent on the programmer/team workflow.

At the team level, it’s guided by the release process, configuration management, which version is canonical. At the programmer level, it’s usually guided by how to switch between task, how easy to explore an idea and save the resulting experiment, how to reset the code to a know state and how to replay a previous changes on top of new changes.

So you discern what you want to do (which is independent of the tool), the learn how to use git to do them. If you start from git, you’re going to be confused, just like someone opening autocad with no knowledge of engineering drawing.

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