> The obsession of git users with rewriting history has always puzzled me. I like that the feature exists, because it is very occasionally useful, but it's one of those things you should almost never use.
I disagree, and it's actually impossible not to use it. Rebase rewrites history. If you have a long-running feature branch you need to merge back into master, you have to rebase it against the current master. There's really no other choice.
> The whole point of history is to have a record of what happened.
Define "what happened" in this context...are we talking about what the feature's changes end up looking like, or the entire linear history of the work on this feature starting from the point at which the programmer experimented with a bunch of dead-ends before finding the right path?
Personally, I feel like an extremely detailed history of my personal problem-solving adventure on every complex ticket is irrelevant. At the end of the day, the code reviewer just wants to know what changed. When I review code, I prefer to look at a massive diff of everything that's been done, not read commit-by-commit. I'd rather see exactly what I'm going to pull in when I merge it into master.
I would also disagree with you here that the whole point of source control is to maintain a history of what happened, and argue that the point of source control is communicating changes between developers on a team. The fact that it backs up your code and keeps a history of what changed are merely secondary features to the central value of providing a way of communicating changes to a codebase between developers. I think Git is the best version control system for doing this, because it allows you to rewrite history. That said, rewriting history is very dangerous and if you use it incorrectly (like never ever rewriting history on a branch other people have to pull from), you're
> If you're going around and changing it, then you no longer have a record of what happened, but a record of what you kind of wish had actually happened.
If you're using Git, this is a complete falsehood if you are the person who made the commits. The reflog provides a reference to every single change made to your repository, so you can just reset back to the point before you rebased and voila, like magic everything is back to the way it was. This isn't a "hack", that's what reflog is for. It's a giant undo list for your local clone of the repo.
So in essence, history is never destroyed. It's just hidden from view. You can always go back in Git unless you actually `rm -rf .git/`.
> Some programmers really want to come across as careful, conscientious, thoughtful programmers, but can't actually accomplish it, so instead they do the usual mess, try to clean it up, then go back and make it look like the code was always clean.
You might be correct in some cases, but I think for the majority of the time you are confusing explicitness with vanity. Programmers want other people on their team to know what they did, or at least the intention of their code, and having commit messages that "tell a story" and make sense are vital for doing that.