[stouset]

On the other hand, to me, this is basically the same story as `git` (sans the cultural gravity of Linus). Incredibly well thought-out internal architecture, extremely talented developers, functional-style immutable datastructures, idiosyncratic frontend that’s a low-level façade over the internals, painful learning curve, often difficult (but possible!) to recover from real-world corruption, etc.

I say this as someone who has loved `git` for a long time and appreciates that knowing the internals and how the commands map onto them leads to an incredibly powerful tool.

[thomastjeffery]

git at least had a good command-line interface and documentation from the start.

Nix is getting better, especially with this release, but it's still far from friendly.

[stouset]

The command-line interface was about the same as it is today. Which is to say, it’s great if you understand the underlying architecture and how the commands map natively to it, but it’s a huge learning curve if you’re coming from something else, have preconceived notions of what commands like “commit”, “checkout”, “fetch” et al do, and don’t have the time or the desire to learn the about what a DAG is.

The cogito interface used to be a thing, but I don’t think it ever gained widespread adoption and was pretty quickly abandoned.

[pxc]

> don’t have the time or the desire to learn the about what a DAG is.

rooted DAG = tree

What programmer doesn't have time for trees?

[kilburn]

rooted DAG != tree, so please don't introduce people to a concept by explicitly misleading them.

All nodes in a tree must have exactly 1 parent, except for the root that has exactly 0 parents. All nodes in a (single-)rooted DAG must have at least one parent, except for the root that has exactly 0 parents.

[pxc]

:-( You're right.

What I said was wrong. It was also doomed to be sloppy at best, because I intended to compare trees as programmers know them (i.e., typically directed and rooted, which is more structure than mathematicians' 'trees' have) to DAGs, which have a precise mathematical definition.

But I hardly meant to introduce anyone to the concept of either DAGs or trees by that comment. If there's a chance of it seriously misleading anyone, I would be happy to see it moderated out of sight.

The point I intended to make, more carefully stated, is this:

DAGs are closely related to structures that programmers already deal with all the time, and so it strikes me as odd when programmers protest learning to work with DAGs.

[thomastjeffery]

> and don’t have the time or the desire to learn the about what a DAG is.

That's the point people are complaining about with git. It's fine to consider that an issue, but that doesn't mean the interface or documentation are bad, it's that people want it to feel familiar.

I, for one, was very comfortable with git's command line from the start. I came in wanting something different, and found the distributed model was just what was needed, and frankly, more straightforeward than the popular centralized approach. It also helps that you can play with and break things locally, rather than having to worry about a server someone else relys on.

[TickleSteve]

cough

Excuse me? the git command line is notorious for being completely unusable.

The point is git's internals are good, the usability is appalling.

[zapita]

As a former hg user, I second that. The fact that git has so many users is a testament to our incredible adaptability as a species. If we can adapt to the git ui, surely we will have no problem colonizing alien planets.