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by pravus 937 days ago
> There’s a meme that Git is hard to use but I think it’s conflating the challenges of getting used to version control at all

No. I had used CVS, SVN, SVK, Bazaar, and Mercurial for years before I switched to Git. I can generally explain the internals of all of these tools (a DAG) to someone in simple terms in minutes. Overlaying that onto the commands becomes easy.

What Git does is take that concept and wrap it in the worst possible workflow UI. The people that immediately grafted onto the Git community cheered this on for some reason very early and then recanted by saying that you are really supposed to build "porcelain" for Git since it was meant to be a rough tool.

To this day all I see are articles about people's confusions and conniptions over simple things that Git does incorrectly because it's UI is horrible. Most can't even get to the point where they understand the DAG. Even though I know what is supposed to happen it's hard for me to fumble around with simple commands because the naming is inconsistent and I have to research to find solutions. This was rarely an issue with Mercurial and when I talk to people that have used both they seem to share that sentiment.

Git is the PHP of version control. Widely used and very popular but has a lot of architectural problems that make it a total mess.