Also it forces you to never get rid of the training wheels it seems.
Gut will never allow you to modify the history pushed to a remote repository.
Prompt me, sure. Disallow? WTF?
My standard work flow is that I have a branch for each change that I commit to without any form. I just use it to checkpoint myself. Yes I push those both as backup and to get CI to tell me things I broke while I keep working without having a full local build kill my machine from the load. At the end I squash, rebase and force push and then merge to master. In fact we only ever allow clean rebase "merges" to master, i.e. fast forwards.
While that's funny it's the opposite of what this is ;)
I'm all for the consistency in commands in gut for newcomers. I absolutely recognize that not everyone can just learn a bunch of command sequences.
That said I do not "get" why people complain about git checkout to switch branches. Svn used that and so being compatible with that was important for adoption even if people today, that don't even know that svn ever existed, find it weird.
But crippling, no sorry basically removing, one of the awesomest feature of git is mind boggling. Not a space bar heater moment. Heck git even deals totally fine with someone having pulled the branch you force pushed. People might not, especially if they never experienced it, but git the piece of software does not break even if you do it.
I'm not saying switch isn't better. I am saying checkout was not a bad choice at the time. Git changed a lot of things vs what people were used to. Keeping some familiarity is actually a good thing for adoption. For "finding yourself at home". That does not mean they couldn't have introduced switch right away of course but the rest is history as they say.
Also, I did reference SVN specifically but even they did not invent this interface and some people surely switched directly from CVS to git without the detour. Do I need to me tion RCS? And they even used the shorthand co instead ;)
So after all that said please do read the quotes around "get". I don't "get" why people complain about it. As in most people seem to do exactly what you just perpetuated as well: they completely ignore historical context and complain why something wasn't done ~20 years ago in a way that takes 2023 context into account.
> I am saying checkout was not a bad choice at the time.
What you actually said is that you don't get why people complain about it.
> even they did not invent this interface
It doesn't matter who invented it. Bad is bad. That's my point.
> most people seem to [...] ignore historical context and complain why something wasn't done ~20 years ago
Historical context isn't completely irrelevant—if the question is how something came to be. People complaining aren't complaining about that, though. They're complaining that it's bad, no matter how it came to be. It's not wrong to do so, and it's weird to say you don't get why they would. "Because it's bad" is why. That's sufficient enough to have a complaint, and anything else is irrelevant.
We may have experienced different complaints. What I hear is complaints like "Why on earth would you ever make switching to a branch be `git checkout`, that makes no sense?".
Queue historical context: Well very easy. In historical context, that would have been intuitive for people that would be using a version control system like git, because they were used to using tools that did the exact same thing.
Same way as a 20 something that has never used anything but git would not "get" why I say: "What's wrong with just using checkout? I've used that for years and years and it's second nature, why would you make me memorize a different way now? Also tell me, why can't I switch other things than branches with git switch, like a tag?"
It's like ChatGPT hype. I totally don't "get" it. If you believe the hype, we're all out of work yesterday. But it's actual capabilities seem to be far more limited and while useful for certain things and able to speed up development time if used right, it does not live up to the hype. Now of course you will correctly point out that not everyone is saying that and you are right. Just like not everyone complains about git checkout like I mentioned. But they exist and if not the majority they're the loudest.
i laughed at seeing that above too - who knows? in other industries it's common to lay the crap on the new guy but haven't experienced that as much in software
However, a first year college student building something and putting it out in public is a great achievement and something to be condemned.