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Picturing Git: Conceptions and Misconceptions

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Re: Picturing Git: Conceptions and Misconceptions

#41

Post by thewebcount »

> The problem with how people use Git, I’m suggesting, is that their analogical or metaphorical conception of Git doesn’t work — it doesn’t fit the way Git actually behaves — if, indeed, the conception exists at all.

No, the problem is not with "how people use Git". The problem is with git. We've known for years how to make clear, concise interfaces that help people understand what's going to happen. Git does not have a clear, concise interface. That is its biggest problem and will continue to be until it is changed to have a clear, concise interface.

Re: Picturing Git: Conceptions and Misconceptions

#42

Post by _aleph2c_ »

Git isn't going away, so we might as well master it.

If you would like to know more about how to manipulate the git graph, take this excellent (and free) training:

https://learngitbranching.js.org/

To slowly level up, you can watch video demonstrations from Dan's git school. Dan provides 48, 30 minute training videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZEGnam2M9s&list=PLu-nSsOS6F...

Re: Picturing Git: Conceptions and Misconceptions

#43

Post by petepete »

BossingAround wrote: post #40
jimbob45 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is just a tool to help you do your real work and famously gets in the way. You use SVN and it covers 99% of use cases much more simply than Git manages.

I've never used SVN, but I assume that because git uniformly won as the VCS tool, it suits most people better than SVN..?

The reason git won was in part due to the success of GitHub. It was the first code sharing platform that wasn't a crap.

Once open source projects started moving to it from older platforms (Sourceforge, Trac, etc), developers who might not have cared so much about VCS flavours followed.

Re: Picturing Git: Conceptions and Misconceptions

#44

Post by cerved »

Certhas wrote: post #30
karaterobot wrote: post #2

I read most of this long article, and I found it useful, but: It's unsurprising that people's mental model of git is incorrect. Git is not something people study at a conceptual level, it's something they learn recipes for in order to work on some project. Recipes like "how do I save all this work I just did" and "oh shit, everything is hosed, please give me a magic spell I can paste into my terminal to fix it". I do…

I think it's the other way around. The fact that git does not provide a clean analogous way to intuitively interact with it just demonstrates that the git interface is horribly broken. This is not essential complexity, it's just bad design that stuck. Take a look at https://gitless.com/ If you just look at a summary of the commands, you will have an accurate mental model of what's going on: gl init - create an empty…

personal opinion, if you're a software engineer that can't be bothered to learn git I'm not sure that I respect you as a professional

Re: Picturing Git: Conceptions and Misconceptions

#45

Post by avip »

jldugger wrote: post #33

> Picturing Git: Conceptions and Misconceptions Based on the title, I was expecting a more in-depth study of user misconceptions about git, similar to the famous CogSci paper "Two Theories of Home Heat Control." Except with like, diagrams. And now I want someone to make that happen.

While you're on wait there, you can read the excellent hg init https://hginit.github.io/ for inspiration.

Re: Picturing Git: Conceptions and Misconceptions

#46

Post by cerved »

thewebcount wrote: post #41

> The problem with how people use Git, I’m suggesting, is that their analogical or metaphorical conception of Git doesn’t work — it doesn’t fit the way Git actually behaves — if, indeed, the conception exists at all. No, the problem is not with "how people use Git". The problem is with git. We've known for years how to make clear, concise interfaces that help people understand what's going to happen. Git does not hav…

git has a very clear, concise and stable interface if you understand how git works. it's designed this way, intentionally. people should stop complaining about it and either learn how to use it, switch to another tool or just write their own interface

Re: Picturing Git: Conceptions and Misconceptions

#47

Post by paulddraper »

Certhas wrote: post #30
karaterobot wrote: post #2

I read most of this long article, and I found it useful, but: It's unsurprising that people's mental model of git is incorrect. Git is not something people study at a conceptual level, it's something they learn recipes for in order to work on some project. Recipes like "how do I save all this work I just did" and "oh shit, everything is hosed, please give me a magic spell I can paste into my terminal to fix it". I do…

I think it's the other way around. The fact that git does not provide a clean analogous way to intuitively interact with it just demonstrates that the git interface is horribly broken. This is not essential complexity, it's just bad design that stuck. Take a look at https://gitless.com/ If you just look at a summary of the commands, you will have an accurate mental model of what's going on: gl init - create an empty…

> just demonstrates that the git interface is horribly broken

This is HN criticism #94238 on the terrible git CLI.

Okay, sure.

Would you kindly post your superior git CLI? Or at least the outline of it?

---

Snark aside, Git's popularity is not an accident. Bitbucket supported Mercurial too.

Re: Picturing Git: Conceptions and Misconceptions

#48

Post by cerved »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #37
bironran wrote: post #9

Ugh. So many concepts. So many things to remember. Why? Git is simple. SIMPLE. But only, IMO, if you go bottom-up and not top-down. There are only 6 critical concepts in Git and each is simple enough to be described in a single sentence. 1. Commits are immutable blobs that have one or more parents. Graphs, not trees. Anyone who uses trees for git commits misses the whole point and makes their (and their collaborators…

Git is definitely not simple. It's simple if you have a solid understanding of data structures (trees, graphs), and know the concept of a pointer. Not everyone has that background. The concepts are learnable, but the commands have complex behavior that often require reference to use properly. The commands aren't simple by any measure because of all of the edge cases that exist.

it's almost as if git is a tool that was designed for software engineers and not accountants

Re: Picturing Git: Conceptions and Misconceptions

#49

Post by avip »

paulddraper wrote: post #47
Certhas wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's the other way around. The fact that git does not provide a clean analogous way to intuitively interact with it just demonstrates that the git interface is horribly broken. This is not essential complexity, it's just bad design that stuck. Take a look at https://gitless.com/ If you just look at a summary of the commands, you will have an accurate mental model of what's going on: gl init - create an empty…

> just demonstrates that the git interface is horribly broken This is HN criticism #94238 on the terrible git CLI. Okay, sure. Would you kindly post your superior git CLI? Or at least the outline of it? --- Snark aside, Git's popularity is not an accident. Bitbucket supported Mercurial too.

git has quite an inconsistent cli, this is well covered in "master git". And yes, I said it without proposing a better one.

Re: Picturing Git: Conceptions and Misconceptions

#50

Post by deckard1 »

jimbob45 wrote: post #5
darekkay wrote: post #3

That's the blog post I always wanted to write. So many people spend little to no time to actually learn Git, because "it's just a tool to help you doing your "real" work" (=coding) . Or because "Git is too difficult/confusing/broken". Or because "I don't need anything except commit/push/pull". I find those arguments somewhat true, but I still feel that people are missing out when they don't learn a tool they use dail…

It is just a tool to help you do your real work and famously gets in the way. You use SVN and it covers 99% of use cases much more simply than Git manages.

that's just laughable considering SVN needs a central repo to work and I can just do "git init ." to create a git repo in any directory at any time I want and is entirely self-contained.

Once an SVN user discovers the magic of a staging area, stashes, or "git add -p" I don't know how they could claim SVN does anything better. All I remember from those days was how slow everything in SVN was. It felt like every command was backed by some horrible O(n^2) operation or really slow network connection.

git isn't hard. FFS, we shouldn't keep seeing these posts hitting HN every week. iptables? That's tough. DNS? No thanks. Managing package.json and keeping an app up-to-date? Git is nothing in comparison to the real challenges I face everyday.

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