There’s this important word in the sentence you seem to be ignoring: “as”
GP isn’t saying “git isn’t confusing”, they’re saying “git isn’t as confusing as people make it out to be”
The point being, people exaggerate git’s confusingness when discussing it. There’s an element of irrationality here that’s worth bringing up, especially when it comes to comparing it to competing software. Once it has a reputation for being confusing, you’re more likely to be scared of certain workflows, you avoid them, and the problem compounds. Similarly if a VCS has a reputation for being “simple”, people might gravitate to it, learn it first, then parrot conclusions that git is too complicated because they never really gave git a chance in the first place (often they do take the time to read the other VCS’s documentation, and if they would have done the same for git they would have had no problems.)
It doesn’t help that there are so many bad tutorials out there that simply give you what commands to run, and tell you dumb stuff like “just make another clone if you get stuck”, and that makes the problem so much worse, and isn’t git’s fault.
Git is a bit confusing sometimes, but it’s mostly for reasons like “the reset and checkout commands do too much”, and “some low level commands are easy to confuse with high level commands” not because it’s a fundamentally confusing tool.
Interesting. "A is X" is different than "I experience X from A". The former employs an objectivist lens while the latter a subjectivist one. I have had the pleasure of witnessing debates about whether a room really, truly is cold or not, which all resulted from a simple "it is cold in here" comment. In my experience modern English speakers tend to bias toward the objectivist register while Japan tends the other way. One of the joys in my life is how absorbing languages and cultures elucidates previously-unperceived distinctions. This discussion makes me want to try picking up Ithkuil again.
But not as many people are as confused as is sometimes made out. And those who are confused are not as confused as people make out¹. Implying that a great many people are very confused because some are is far more gaslighty than suggesting it isn't that hard in the majority of circumstances, IMO.
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[1] many (and I'd include myself here) are fine using the basics, perhaps with some less as-simple-as-possible workflows, but might need to scan the docs if they hit a conflict merging two branches that have developed independently for a fair few commits and have overlaps
The common stance is that people try to use said API without reading the docs. Like the first paragraphs of the git-rebase description
Transplant a series of commits onto a different starting point. You can also use git rebase to reorder or combine commits: see INTERACTIVE MODE below for how to do that.
And then later
Rebasing interactively means that you have a chance to edit the commits which are rebased. You can reorder the commits, and you can remove them (weeding out bad or otherwise unwanted patches).
Those are obvious IF you know what a commit is and how they relate to each other (a DAG). But most people don’t. Instead, their only knowledge is what they’ve seen the operation do (tutorial or youtube video).
Git itself has a glossary[0] of the terms used in the docs.
plenty of models do fine with assuming a flat earth. git is an incredibly competent swiss army knife for building VCS but I'm not convinced it's the best we can ever do (nor we have ever done) for the simple linear history we expect from your usual corpo crud.
>The people are confused, it's a fact. So it is confusing. Stop gaslighting people.
I don't think this sort of aggression is warranted, as the fact that I find something confusing doesn't directly imply an intrinsic feature of the object that I'm confused with. One can reach that conclusion by observing that, not everyone who learns about the object finds it equally confusing.
All that to say: "The people are confused" doesn't mean that "All people are confused".
> Let's not start to bend reality just to back up some narrative because after reading a N hours documentation everything is OK.
If you expect everything to be as easy as pie without needing to make a little effort to read a bit of documentation, then perhaps the problem is not the product but the fact that you are in the wrong industry, or the wrong role within that industry, for you. Have you considered a management track?
Git is intended to make certain patterns possible, and practical. “Easy for people won't read some documentation” was never one of its design goals.
> There are other software similar to git that have not such reputation. Version control is not new.
Yes, there are alternatives that aren't used by anyone except dedicated fans. If they had the wide user base that git enjoyed you'd hear just as many complaints about them.
> If your product has a reputation to confuse users compared to other products, your product confuses users.
Is your contention that all reputations are deserved, by definition? That’s certainly an interesting take. It leaves zero room for the concept of an “unfair reputation” for example. Maybe you should rethink your argument here.
I've elaborated on why I think git's reputation is undeserved in sibling comments. kreco's contention is that "it has a reputation of being confusing, therefore it is confusing", which I think is bollocks. They're throwing accusations of "gaslighting" around.
It's valid to think "yes it has a reputation for being confusing, but much of it is undeserved". It's not black-and-white.
> "yes it has a reputation for being confusing, but much of it is undeserved"
This is not what is written here:
> Git is not nearly as confusing as people make it out to be. They just never take the few hours it takes to understand it. Which is a sad state of affairs for such an essential tool in the belt of any software engineer.
> just does not cut it, if you call yourself a professional.
You've made one and only one point in this thread so far: I'm addressing only that point. You've provided no other elaborations. You're saying "it has a reputation for being confusing, therefore it is confusing." That's a bullshit statement, IMO.
If you made any other elaborations on why you disagree with the post you were arguing against, we'd have something else to discuss. But right now you're just posting shallow dismissals with fallacious arguments. You can do better.
> You've made one and only one point in this thread so far: I'm addressing only that point. You've provided no other elaborations. You're saying "it has a reputation for being confusing, therefore it is confusing." That's a bullshit statement, IMO.
I'll repeat myself, I can show you thousands of messages point out how git is confusing.
I can show you plenty of message saying "I used X it was fine, but I used git and it's cumbersome", please show me the same amount of messages telling "I used git it was fine, but I used XXX and it's cumbersome."
GP isn’t saying “git isn’t confusing”, they’re saying “git isn’t as confusing as people make it out to be”
The point being, people exaggerate git’s confusingness when discussing it. There’s an element of irrationality here that’s worth bringing up, especially when it comes to comparing it to competing software. Once it has a reputation for being confusing, you’re more likely to be scared of certain workflows, you avoid them, and the problem compounds. Similarly if a VCS has a reputation for being “simple”, people might gravitate to it, learn it first, then parrot conclusions that git is too complicated because they never really gave git a chance in the first place (often they do take the time to read the other VCS’s documentation, and if they would have done the same for git they would have had no problems.)
It doesn’t help that there are so many bad tutorials out there that simply give you what commands to run, and tell you dumb stuff like “just make another clone if you get stuck”, and that makes the problem so much worse, and isn’t git’s fault.
Git is a bit confusing sometimes, but it’s mostly for reasons like “the reset and checkout commands do too much”, and “some low level commands are easy to confuse with high level commands” not because it’s a fundamentally confusing tool.