Do you think if I had a choice, I would have chosen Git? Ugh.
No, I'm forced to use it as a condition of employment.
You're right: I'm not qualified to use it, I disqualify myself with the rule "only use software that at least pretends to be usable", but that doesn't mean I have a choice in the matter.
I don't want to be able to think the same way people who think Git is a great tool think. If that makes sense.
If I get brainwashed into thinking Git is well-designed or good in any way, I'm afraid I'll completely lose my ability to design quality user interfaces.
Git with its interface may be rough, but this is merely a superficial trait.
The same category as saying that Erlang is fugly because its syntax derives
from Prolog. Who cares? It's mechanics and semantics, respectively, that
matter.
I can whack git repository with a hammer and achieve good, reliable results
this way (and I already needed it several times in weird scenarios; I wouldn't
get far with Hg under the same circumstances). Pretty much the same case as
with Linux OS: all the internals are easily accessible, and user interface is
just good enough for me to use.
I want to build software normal human beings can actually use. Git is not that. Learning more about Git is me going in the wrong direction entirely. I don't want to go in the wrong direction, I want to go in the right direction.
That's a shame it takes them weeks to read three quite comprehensible man
pages to think up two different ways of changing commit history.
How did we actually get to the point where it takes weeks of training to use
git, when I remember learning how to use it in a day or two, ten years ago
(when it was much less usable and documented), and for a (far from trivial)
use case of being a helper tool for off-line work with Subversion?
the desire would be to have a system which let you get started relatively quickly, and learn it more in depth as you have need to.
git really doesn't work this way because unless you manage your branching and merging in a sympathetic way (to both git and your peers), you can get very thoroughly punished.
> Probably because you have 10 years of experience?
I was learning git a decade ago, and all it took was at most two days of
reading. And yes, this includes the idea on how to rewrite commit history
(actually another one, very low-level; I don't expect anybody to ever think of
this way for the task).
I didn't have StackOverflow or plethora of tutorials on web that are present
today.
> Git is a mess
I keep hearing that, but once upon a time (seven? years ago) I tried learning
Mercurial, this paragon of usability, and I couldn't figure out one of the
simpler things: how to setup a repository to merge changes from two other
repositories without specifying full paths.
Given that, either I'm very smart, because I picked up git so quickly, but
so-praised Mercurial "is a mess", or I'm very stupid, because I couldn't
figure so simple Mercurial function, but then what does it say about people
who can't read the fsckin' git docs?
