[Certhas]

Sorry, but what? Specifically: what about your writing justifies the assertion that git is simple? Git is a horrible convoluted set of commands to make a lot of different data structures [1] interact. And if you do it wrong you can get into very weird states. This is not simple in any meaningful sense of the word!

Heck, "a monoid in the category of endofunctors" is simpler.

[1] From the top of my head: The working tree, the index, the stash, the repo ADG, the local remote repo ADG, the remote repo ADG. Of course the branch labels are further state, and working with the commits directly is discouraged. Oh and files can be either tracked or not, and they can either be ignored or no. And one isn't a subset of the other. And that also interacts with the various state transitions.

[bironran]

Any system with a limited amount of concepts is simple. Emergent properties are easy to predict and explore. Physics of "perfect friction-less sphere in vacuum" is so easy to understand we teach in grade schools and toddlers grasp it by instinct.

I can't (yet) reason about monoids easily. But I can reason about Git, even if I can't figure out the single command to change the state the way I want it and have to resort to multiple commands. I guess it's easier for me to think in graphs.

[Certhas]

But it's not a limited amount of concepts. One sphere in a vacuum is easy, three spheres is hard. Git has half a dozen subtle interacting data structures. But because people have built up a lot of experience working with them (and don't coach beginners and non-programmers) they shout "it's just an ADG, so simple!" and pretend like everything is fine...

[sigjuice]

Agreed. I have a couple of things to make my life slightly easier.

I could never understand what kind of twilight zone stashes go into or remember which stash is which when I had too many of them. So I never use stashes any more, I just make a branch instead.

I largely use git add -A, so I can pretend that the index does not exist.