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by kinkrtyavimoodh 1251 days ago
i am no apologetic for the messy git UI. But i also know that any competent software engineer can be given a sufficient understanding / mental model of the basic git way of doing things in 1-2 hours, after which they can Google for the exact syntax of the commands they need (if they are doing complicated things). i feel that if they are unwilling to invest even that much time, then they are going to waste an eternity on endless tools and GUIs.

it's like tar or rsync or ffmpeg. Yes, it's hard to keep track of all the command line flags etc. but thanks to the internet we don't need to. it's far more useful to understand the underlying concepts.

2 comments

Git is intrinsically a graph model. It's well-suited for very rich and effective visual representations.

If the cli "matched up" with a visual way of thinking, for many of us, the cli would become second nature. But it just doesn't match up. It's fugly and needlessly hard to remember and become fluent in at least for us "incompetent" engineers who already have too much to work on.

And how do you KNOW this? My experiences-- and many other's experiences have suggested otherwise.

Also it's foolish to suggest that one of the 21st century's most complex repository management software is just like tar, or rsync. What planet are you from?