> On the inside, Git is a thing of beauty, marvel of engineering. On the outside, it is a mess of inconsistent command line options, terrible documentation, and snobbish community that thinks everything of this is fine and small surface details are irrelevant as long as the core works exactly as advertised
The core working exactly as advertised is vitally important! Rotten core + shiny, 'user-friendly' exterior would be a polished turd.
I do agree - the outside of git didn't have to be ugly and I'm yet to meet any git 'apologist' who disagrees or thinks it's fine. In mitigation though, the git command can be wrapped by friendlier CLI tools or GUIs. Git has succeeded largely in part of the massive tooling around it - things like GitHub would have been less likely to exist had Git's internal data structures been opaque or poorly designed.
It might be instructive to hear it from the horses mouth: Linux, on git "git actually has a simple design, with stable and reasonably well-documented data structures. In fact, I'm a huge proponent of designing your code around the data, rather than the other way around, and I think it's one of the reasons git has been fairly successful […] I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important."
The core working exactly as advertised is vitally important! Rotten core + shiny, 'user-friendly' exterior would be a polished turd.
I do agree - the outside of git didn't have to be ugly and I'm yet to meet any git 'apologist' who disagrees or thinks it's fine. In mitigation though, the git command can be wrapped by friendlier CLI tools or GUIs. Git has succeeded largely in part of the massive tooling around it - things like GitHub would have been less likely to exist had Git's internal data structures been opaque or poorly designed.
It might be instructive to hear it from the horses mouth: Linux, on git "git actually has a simple design, with stable and reasonably well-documented data structures. In fact, I'm a huge proponent of designing your code around the data, rather than the other way around, and I think it's one of the reasons git has been fairly successful […] I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important."