[maker1138]

I'm surprised at how many people are responding negatively to software that improves user experience.

Suppose we had started out with the command UI that gitless has and someone came along and tried to sell us the current git cli UI. It would be completely ridiculed.

The only thing possibly questionable about the gitless interface is that it does away with staging. However, you can always fall back to git for staging functionality if you like, and use gitless for most other commands. I think it is a win.

[gnuvince]

I think the author address that point in the introduction:

> Experts, who are deeply familiar with the product, have learned its many intricacies, developed complex, customized workflows, and regularly exploit its most elaborate features, are often defensive and resistant to the suggestion that the design has flaws.

Having spent dozens, even hundreds, of hours learning the intricacies of the Git command-line, it must be extremely shocking and insulting when you are told that those efforts were in vain, because the original UI was not very good and an alternative can be grokked by people of varying levels of technical competence with only a fraction of the effort you put into the original thing. I think this is what we're seeing here: people will try and defend their time investment by arguing that a professional would learn the hard thing and not lower himself to easy-to-use tools, that the new UI hides some powerful features that are rarely used, etc.

[austinjp]

Indeed. Also known as "sunk cost fallacy".

[IshKebab]

I think it's a little different from that actually. That's normally about the merits of ongoing financial investment, but I get your analogy and there should be a name for it because you see it all the time from compsci types.

How about "sunk knowledge fallacy" or something like that?

[cies]

> "sunk cost fallacy"

I like to spot those, did not see this one though, but indeed, sunk cost fallacy it is. Well spotted :)

[bulatb]

Using artificially complex, unfriendly tools is a form of honest signaling. [0]

Making tools complex and painful, denying their complexity, and scoffing at the very notion of allowing a non-expert to accomplish what before required esoteric knowledge is the way the tribe of self-styled Real Programmers protects its integrity.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory#Honest_sig...

[njharman]

"dumbed down" only improves the user experience of new users. It hurts power users and is rarely useful to anyone other than newbs.

It can be net gain for infrequently used and rarely mastered tools. Source Control should the 2nd (after editor) most mastered tool of a developer.

Many will assume this is "dumbed down" interface and thus overall bad for source control tool.

[TuringTest]

> "dumbed down" only improves the user experience of new users. It hurts power users and is rarely useful to anyone other than newbs.

That's only true if the power users perform a completely different group of tasks from the new users, or if the "new user" interface is made wholly incompatible with the "power user" interface.

If the power users still needs to perform the same basic tasks, the simplified and easier interface will likely make those tasks more efficient for the power user as well.

[popmystack]

>I'm surprised at how many people are responding negatively to software that improves user experience.

At the cost of doing things technically correct.