[crispyambulance]

Git is neither beautiful nor elegant. It survives because it does the job and a critical mass of people has miraculously brought it to prominence.

What I will NEVER be able to understand is WHY the commands are so fucked-up, inconsistent and counter-intuitive. It doesn't have to be that way.

If git feels comfortable, it's only because you've crashed and burned it so many times or suffered though countless google searches to eventually remember the commands that are appropriate for your workflow.

[sirsuki]

The reason "the commands are so [messed]-up, inconsistent and counter-intuitive" is most likely that you expect the commands to represent your mental model of the system when in fact they represent the mental model of the system designers.

I once felt it was weird till I dove in and looked at the underlying data model. Then It struck me and all the awkwardness evaporated and the commands actually make sense to me now.

[rstuart4133]

> when in fact they represent the mental model of the system designers.

It sure doesn't feel like that.

Instead it feels rather like a lump of code I'm dealing with now. The needed to add feature X, so they did a brief look for the easiest place to bolt it on. In the code I'm dealing with now that meant y2k stuff was placed in with the tracing code, I presume because the trace headers were used everywhere y2k was needed so they didn't have to add new modules.

In Git case "git reset" has so many features only tangentially related it looks to me the person adding the feature must have followed the same "I need X, I don't want to add or even think about how the CLI is structured so I'll just sneak it in with CLI command Z which looks vaguely similar". And thus we end up with the a similar mess to the code I'm dealing with.

In Hg's case someone evidently put a lot of thought into the overall mental model the CLI would create, and came up with something rather neat. Sadly it doesn't always reflect how it operates underneath, so it can confuse people when things go wrong. When the abstraction created by the CLI breaks, you end up having to do what all people do abstractions leak and learn two things: both the abstraction and how it really works underneath. But Hg's CLI is so well designed casual users will never have to deal with it.

In git's case the CLI bears little relationship to anything. Because nothing is where you expect nor does quite what you think it should things go wrong really quickly. That forces users to learn and think in terms of the underlying data structure which creates a lot of pain up front, but in the end you are always better off understanding things in terms of how they work underneath.

The interesting thing is git is _so_ bad the official git doco has a really good section devoted to describing what is happening underneath, which makes learning it fairly straight forward. Hg doco doesn't do that. While there are some descriptions of how it works underneath it's interwoven in with the description of the CLI, so you can't just read one smallish section and get the big picture. Worse, you can never be sure whether they are describing the model presented by CLI, or what actually happens to be bits and bytes. This makes the jump to real understanding how Hg works harder than git. It's weird how things turn out. I guess which is better depends on the situation.

In any case, please don't dignify git's CLI by claiming it conforms to someone's mental model. To paraphrase Linus, if it does, that someone must have been a demented ferret.

[crispyambulance]

That's the best and most plausible explanation I've heard for why the git CLI is the way it is.

IDE's do try to smooth the edges of working with git, but it's never optimal, I know because I do occasionally have to drop into the git commandline with visual studio. I think IDE integrations just plaster over the mess and cut-off access to stuff you actually need to use from time to time. In other words, I don't think it's feasible, for instance, to only use git through the visual studio IDE.

Every once in a while people will talk about "porcelain" in the git commandline-- it's the notion of creating "ergonomic" command line semantics that behind the scenes are just compositions of the traditional shitty git commands. While I appreciate the pun, it still seems like it is avoiding the root problem.

Ultimately, I just can't understand: why isn't it possible to "clean up" the git CLI so that it's coherent and semantically compatible with how people use the thing? A million or so people use this tool for countless numbers of projects. How much time and effort could be saved by making it so that people can just remember commands, use them effectively, and stop having to throw away work again and again by blowing away folders and starting over with a "fresh" clone... simply because it's easier to start-over than to figure out the correct incantations when you're under time pressure?

[mixmastamyk]

> till I dove in and looked at the underlying data model.

Everyone says that and I've done the same. Quickly forgotten and left with the same inscrutable commands and looking up explanations on stack overflow.