Comment by DannyBee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DannyBee | Hacker News Reader

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It's interesting to watch people here defend git's interface as if it was all a very deliberate, intricate design that is well justified and thought out, when it very clearly grew organically. Not that there was "no" thought, but it's not like there is a huge poster on a wall in Junio's office (I checked) or the surrounding whiteboards, that have git UI principles that are being enforced on new commands/patches.

Basically, people are wrapping stuff up in justifications that didn't even exist when the commands came to be.

That doesn't make it bad, of course, but uh, retroactively justifying things is always a bit odd to watch.

I actually could care less about either git or mercurial; having helped write subversion, the majority of us were/are glad that we were replaced by not just one, but two things that people like more. The fact that it "destroyed" our software is irrelevant, Subversion made what we set out to make, something better than CVS, succeeded, and then the world got even better through git and hg.

The fact that git and hg proponents seem to simply enjoy fighting about which VCS is better/worse, rather than concentrating on making actual progress, is fascinating to me.

> It's interesting to watch people here defend git's interface as if it was all a very deliberate, intricate design that is well justified and thought out, when it very clearly grew organically.

I don't see people doing too often, to be honest.

I do see git proponents saying that commands like git-checkout are misunderstood, but that isn't contradictory to "organic growth". From the beginning Linus was claiming that git was more of a content-addressable filesystem than an actual designed VCS.

If anything defenses like "git checkout -b is just shorthand for git branch && git checkout" are nothing but an acknowledgment of that organic growth. There's no reason to add a shorthand for a command sequence that no one uses.

Retroactively justifying things is what we always do. Here's an excerpt from Dan Ariely's "The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty":

> The experience taught me that sometimes (perhaps often) we don't make choices based on our explicit preferences. Instead, we have a gut feeling about what we want, and we go through a process of mental gymnastics, applying all kinds of justifications to manipulate the criteria. That ways, we can get what we really want, but at the same time keep up the appearance -- to ourselves and to others -- that we are acting in accordance with our rational and well-reasoned preferences.

Simply replace all occurrence of "we" with "mercurial/git fanboys" based on your own preferences ;)

Thank you for Subversion :) Not only was it better than CVS but it was a damn site better than Visual SourceSafe too, which was often the alternative in Microsoft-land.

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