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I see a future in jj

steveklabnik.com

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Re: I see a future in jj

#11

Post by nonethewiser »

Bolwin wrote: post #4

Since JJ has technically git compat, I think there's 2 things needed for it to take off 1. A good vscode extension (there's two so-so ones that I'm not sure are being updated) 2. LLM knowledge. I ask gpt-5 about doing something in jj the other day, it didn't even recognize it at first. When I reminded it it was a vcs it hallucinated half the commands. I ended up figuring it out myself from the docs

You're kind of right about LLM knowledge but the implication is funny. We just cant be expected to learn new things without LLMs...

Re: I see a future in jj

#13

Post by kelnos »

steveklabnik wrote: post #7
kelnos wrote: post #6

At the risk of being unreasonably negative, stuff like this just makes me feel... tired. Git is... fine. I'm sure it doesn't solve every problem for everyone, and oh boy does it still have many rough edges, but it works and (as the article points out), git has won and is widely adopted. I've extensively used CVS and Subversion in the past. I touched Mercurial and Bazaar when I ran into a project that used it. I remem…

I think being conservative about tool use is totally fine! I'm actually pretty conservative about most of the tools that I use. The goal of this post wasn't really to convince anyone on why they may want to give jj a shot, more of just a post about how I think about technologies I may want to spend my limited time on this planet working on, and announce that I'm making a move. I don't think that you're being unreason…

Sure, definitely, sorry for being a bit off-topic, clearly this was about you and your plans and not intended to be about jj itself.

Having said what I said, I do find new tools to be interesting, and I do hope jj ends up being successful. I'm always happy to be surprised by something that fixes problems that I didn't consciously know I had, or that adds new features or work modes that make my life easier in ways that never would have occurred to me in the first place. I was a pretty early git adopter, and it works great for me, but I'm sure a decent chunk of that is because I understand how it works under the hood, even if it often doesn't present a great UX.

And even if jj doesn't eventually surpass git's popularity, it's great to have other options, and avoid monocultures.

Re: I see a future in jj

#14

Post by steveklabnik »

jimbokun wrote: post #8
steveklabnik wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think being conservative about tool use is totally fine! I'm actually pretty conservative about most of the tools that I use. The goal of this post wasn't really to convince anyone on why they may want to give jj a shot, more of just a post about how I think about technologies I may want to spend my limited time on this planet working on, and announce that I'm making a move. I don't think that you're being unreason…

One thing not mentioned in the article: what advantages does jj offer over plain git?

So for me, the most compelling thing about jj is that it is somehow simpler than git, while also being more powerful than git.

What I mean by simpler is, there's fewer features, which makes things easier to pick up, because these features fit together in a way that's more coherent than git's. By more powerful, I mean jj lets me regularly do things that are possible, but annoying and/or difficult in git.

I loved git. I was never the kind of person who thought its CLI was bad. But then, when I found jj, I realized why people thought that.

Re: I see a future in jj

#17

Post by jimbokun »

steveklabnik wrote: post #14
jimbokun wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing not mentioned in the article: what advantages does jj offer over plain git?

So for me, the most compelling thing about jj is that it is somehow simpler than git, while also being more powerful than git. What I mean by simpler is, there's fewer features, which makes things easier to pick up, because these features fit together in a way that's more coherent than git's. By more powerful, I mean jj lets me regularly do things that are possible, but annoying and/or difficult in git. I loved git.…

So better UX while keeping git's solid internals?

Makes sense. Developers I know have been wanting that.

Re: I see a future in jj

#18

Post by wk_end »

steveklabnik wrote: post #14
jimbokun wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing not mentioned in the article: what advantages does jj offer over plain git?

So for me, the most compelling thing about jj is that it is somehow simpler than git, while also being more powerful than git. What I mean by simpler is, there's fewer features, which makes things easier to pick up, because these features fit together in a way that's more coherent than git's. By more powerful, I mean jj lets me regularly do things that are possible, but annoying and/or difficult in git. I loved git.…

As someone who loves git, has always thought the criticisms about its interface were overstated... but also feels like it maybe has too many incoherent ways of doing things, this is the best sales pitch I could've asked for (and I came to the comments to ask for a sales pitch). Thanks - I'll try jj out the next time I start a hobby project.

Re: I see a future in jj

#19

Post by jakub_g »

kelnos wrote: post #6

At the risk of being unreasonably negative, stuff like this just makes me feel... tired. Git is... fine. I'm sure it doesn't solve every problem for everyone, and oh boy does it still have many rough edges, but it works and (as the article points out), git has won and is widely adopted. I've extensively used CVS and Subversion in the past. I touched Mercurial and Bazaar when I ran into a project that used it. I remem…

The good thing is that a new player entering the arena allows a fresh look at certain problems, and some solutions then get backported to the OG project. I've read it already happened that jj inspired some changes in git.

Same happened e.g. with nodejs getting deno and bun around, which allowed to break nodejs' inertia on many problems that the others have solved.

Re: I see a future in jj

#20

Post by steveklabnik »

jimbokun wrote: post #17
steveklabnik wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So for me, the most compelling thing about jj is that it is somehow simpler than git, while also being more powerful than git. What I mean by simpler is, there's fewer features, which makes things easier to pick up, because these features fit together in a way that's more coherent than git's. By more powerful, I mean jj lets me regularly do things that are possible, but annoying and/or difficult in git. I loved git.…

So better UX while keeping git's solid internals? Makes sense. Developers I know have been wanting that.

It's technically a bit more than that. JJ is its own VCS, with pluggable backends. Google has a closed-source Piper backend, the git backend is the only real open source backend. But at high level, it's fine to think about it in that way, yeah. I tend to think about it as being more "able to work on git repos" than as a UI.
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