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by kreco 14 days ago
There is no aggression.

If your product has a reputation to confuse users compared to other products, your product confuses users.

Let's not start to bend reality just to back up some narrative because after reading a N hours documentation everything is OK.

2 comments

> 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.

You conveniently cherry picked the least relevant part of my message.

No one said everything should be easy as pie.

There are other software similar to git that have not such reputation. Version control is not new.

> 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.

Because people actually use Git instead of whatever you mean.
This is irrelevant to the topic.

I didn't ask why git was widely used. I didn't say git was useless.

Again, there were version controls before git came out.

I think the point was that a lot of people are confused by git because a lot of people use it. Meaning that the other software where people don’t complain would get the same amount of complaints if it had as many users as git has.
> If you expect everything to be as easy as pie without needing to make a little effort to read a bit of documentation

Classic strawman.

> 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.

do you think everyone who claims to be confused by git is making it up? or do you just think you're better than them?
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 seem very emotionally attached to what is, at the end of the day, just one of many version control systems.
You are moving the goalposts.

I could show you thousands of message backing up the confusion.

But you can keep nitpick irrelevant part of messages and pretend you are very smart.

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."

Git has many orders of magnitude more users than other VCS's. The assumption should be that you'd find many orders of magnitude more people finding it confusing than other VCS's. Even if the UX was more or less the same.

I'm also not claiming git isn't confusing (I've explained that it is, in another post), I'm claiming its reputation is undeserved, in that it's not as confusing as people make it out to be. You seem to reject the notion that such a statement is even valid, claiming that reputations are always deserved. I find that to be bullshit.