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by asauce 2538 days ago
In my experience the reason why people struggle with git is because git is also their introduction to source control. Students generally get the gist of staging and commiting, but usually braches/merges/rebasing causes a lot of issues.

The other thing is that students are also scared to get their hands dirty with git. Some of them don't fully understand source control and therefore they are terrified that if they commit/merge something incorrectly then they will destroy the whole code base.
2 comments
RHSeeger 2538 days ago
As someone who went through RCS, CSV, SVN, ClearCase, and some others... no, not really. Git just does a great job of taking things that are simple in every other VC and making them hard to understand. Git is powerful, but it's completely user unfriendly.
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int0x80 2538 days ago
For example?
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malingo 2538 days ago
The key is to not introduce git in the context of a real codebase. The codebase is precious, and git (for a beginner) is a a bunch of confusing, sharp tools. The cost of a misstep is too high.

Working with a "throwaway" local repo was crucial when I was learning git. It was just a handful of gibberish text files in a few directories, and I experimented with "what happens when I run this git command?", comparing what actually happened with my expectations of what would happen.

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