[pjc50]

I'm genuinely amazed people can use git at all without understanding it completely. The mnemonics make zero sense without background, and the operations are completely arbitrary looking.

Remember, most things people use every day without understanding them completely. This is a huge barrier to entry and effective use of git; you can't require people to spend weeks learning it before they commit a single line of code. So yes, people learn sets of runes that work, and know that if you step off the path there's no easy way of working out what happened let alone undoing it without blowing away the local copy and going back to the master.

[dozzie]

> [...] you can't require people to spend weeks learning it before they commit a single line of code.

But you can expect them to spend two hours to understand the little number of fundamental objects that git works with, and maybe another quarter for basic operations (fetch, push, merge).