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Dana Fried
I posted a rant in someone else's mentions which I regret and then deleted but I need to vent. I use git every day. I'm very comfortable with git. Also: git is fucking terrible, and I suspect it's the reason a lot of people get scared away from writing software. 208 comments
Mx. Eddie R
LB:
Si Dawson
@silvermoon82 YES! I'm glad I'm not the only person that can see this. It's a beautiful, elegant design... wrapped in a dumpster. Full of toxic waste. That's on fire. I'm waiting, eventually, the world will wake up and go "oh, what WERE we thinking?!?" and move on. But I suspect I'm going to be waiting a while. Git is AWFUL. Also, the Emperor has no clothes.
Mx. Eddie R
@sidawson
Si Dawson
@silvermoon82 Sadly, yes. Also, I think there's a LOT of Stockholm Syndrome. "I've invested SO much time and pain learning this tool. Therefore, I must be 1337, and because it proves I'm worthy (& other people struggle with it, therefore proving I must be better than them), I will defend this tool to my death."
Dana Fried
Imagine you're someone with an interest in learning how to code. Perhaps you're from one or more communities that face serious stereotype threat in this area (e.g. a woman or a BIPoC person) - that is, you don't have a ton of role models and may even have been told outright that coding isn't *for you*. But you decided to Do The Thing anyway, because you're a badass.
Dana Fried
Imagine the steps you need to go through: 1. Pick a language. Python, Ruby, etc. There are nice tutorials online. You do them and feel smart. 2. Download a runtime and start writing code locally, testing it out. This can be tricky if you are trying to do web stuff, but whatever. You feel smart. 3. Okay, you actually wanna do *development*? Then learn git. The names confuse you. You end up fucking up your source tree six times before you learn reflog. You feel like an idiot.
Dana Fried
I am extremely convinced that git is the Great Filter for people trying to get into coding on their own. It never ceases to make me sad and frustrated that we've settled on the Worst Possible Tool to do source management. Nothing in git is named or grouped coherently. It's the opposite of discoverable. Even with tab completion. By the way, you know who doesn't get tab completion? Windows users. Which is most people who are gonna try to learn to program on their own.
Jeffrey Hulten
Don't tell anyone, but by git aliases map my old SVN finger macros over to the arcane git commands.
Dana Fried
@jhulten I should use more aliases, except I'd have to implement them across multiple operating systems and shell environments
Jeffrey Hulten
@tess A decade ago I used freshshell to automate my dotfiles for *nix hosts. Now that I have WSL, I am covered everywhere.
Jeffrey Hulten
@tess I was consulting and would get a laptop for six months, sometimes overlapping between clients. I got it down to about 20 minutes to install most of my config and standard tools.
Ylva :babaw_soft: :sheher: :babaw_is: :babaw_me:
@tess That's why asshole coders need to stop being gatekeepy about real coders using git from the command line Honestly, the devs that feel better than others because they use CLI are likely the worst at actually commitng properly. GUI's make it so much easier to cherry pick files and lines, and makes it much harder to make mistakes 
William Pietri
@tess Totally. It was a tool made for an unusual case in a different era, created by experts designing for experts. I would love to see a modern VCS tool emerge, one that focuses on the common use cases for modern development, and designed with novices in mind.
William Pietri
@tess Is it? It's older than git by a decade, right? And it's still a commercial product, I thought.
Dana Fried
@williampietri free for a lot of small-scale use IIRC, and pretty constantly updated also IIRC, plus what's wrong with paying for a good tool? But fine, use subversion plus a decent OSS shell integration.
William Pietri
@tess Version control is an area where I'd be especially cautious about vendor lock-in. Especially in this age of enshittification. There's no way I'm trusting a company owned by private equity over a long-term relationship. And that's before we get to all the open-source concerns, where I think git has a legitimate edge. I think the Perforce/SVN centralization/SPoF model can be fine for companies. But that centralized control mindset doesn't work for richer relationship approaches.
Dana Fried
@williampietri even OSS projects have a central repo with the "canonical" source; I don't see the difference between hosting code on github or equivalent vs having it on a hosted SVN server. 
AndreaTvillingππ³οΈββ§οΈππ»πΊπ¦
it depends... if you start in linux kernel development or surrounding middleware, it's The Most Natural tool pretty much soon after you start - rest is more complex than git.
AndreaTvillingππ³οΈββ§οΈππ»πΊπ¦
mostly worked with hardware (from big iron to network equipment to embedded) or design, all after uni. Uni are rarely to give proper sw de loop anyway
Dana Fried
Your source management tool should be the *easiest* tool you use, not the hardest. The order of difficulty in tasks should be: write code > test code > build code > manage code But in the real world the order is, somehow: manage code > build code > test code > write code This is incredibly stupid.
Dana Fried
@sophieschmieg precisely. Also: it's a graph theory peg being rammed into a source control hole. Chrome at least gives us a bunch of common functionality that sands *some* of the sharp edges off of it, but it's still awful to use and I'm still learning tricks that make my experience with it less painful five years after starting with it. 
Sindarina, Edge Case Detective
@tess Is this about command-line git usage? A decent GUI client made it so much easier, for me.
The Modesto Kid
@tess I wrote code as my job for 25 years and spent very little time or energy on source code control. This had pluses and minuses and would probably not be possible any more. I did not work on teams very much until the very end of my career (last year in the industry was 2020).
firstprimate
@tess Right!?!? And donβt get me started with some of the tool chains. Looking at you JavaScript.
dstu
@tess 100% agreement about git not being the right thing to hand to people who are new to source control. When I was a TA, the professor wanted students to turn in assignments with a "real" tool. I opted for SVN over git. Students still did silly things when committing to the course repository, but I wasn't about to tell them to pick up a tool whose handles consisted almost entirely of sharp edges. The course was "make Roombas play soccer," not "how to lose your source code like the pros."
AndreaTvillingππ³οΈββ§οΈππ»πΊπ¦
my observations during hackathons with (mainly) students say me:
dstu
@aytvill @tess (a) was definitely true... the prof's intention was for students to collaborate over svn, but I'm pretty sure most teams just hacked locally and committed to an assignment's tag when it was time to turn in. I'm not sure I understand your points (b) and (c). Were they complaining that the uni setting simplifies the collaboration problems you get in industry [so SCm as taught at school isn't helpful], and big FLOSS projects require use of git [so learning other tools doesn't help]?
AndreaTvillingππ³οΈββ§οΈππ»πΊπ¦
b) if your team has luxury of personal meetings, typically enforced by mgmt, then async dev mode turns into sync slot mode - you go away from bazaar to cathedral c) large FLOSS is bazaar at roots and that's what makes cathedral folks to abhor at dealing with what they perceive as chaos ;) 
Third spruce tree on the left
@trurl @tess I've been using lesser source controls (rcs, cvs, pvcs, clearcase, mks, some real esoteric ones) for years, then subversion for over a decade. Then I had to move to git, sourcetree and crapbucket. Then I learned fear. I've read many guides, but I still couldn't explain what a rebase is.
dstu
@tess I am pretty far removed from teaching tools like this nowadays. If advising a smart, driven friend who's running Windows (like, say, my friend with a bio PhD who keeps asking me questions about awk and shell scripting), I would probably suggest they use their IDE's support for git or a shell extension like https://tortoisegit.org/. Is that a reasonable starting point these days?
dstu
It doesn't help with the git model (or the myriad of oopsies like, "I rebased and can't push to remote anymore," and "I checked out a floating HEAD what is a floating HEAD oh god"), but at least it provides a UI layer that might help keep them from straying into that territory in the first week.
Dana Fried
@trurl oh neat, I didn't realize Tortoise did a git implementation! I used their SVN integration for along time. (Unfortunately, I'm now developing on three platforms for five, so I can't consistently use Tortoise.)
Jonathan Dierksen
@trurl @tess +1 for using the IDE. One chicken-and-egg reason for git becoming so ubiquitous is the amount of tooling for it. The fact that I can pull up VSCode and do all my day-to-day git stuff with just a couple of clicks makes it easy to ignore how awful it is under the hood. Comparing to Perforce, which I also have to use daily, which has minimal VSCode support, and I have to jump back to the (admittedly, 100x better) command line for the 10k edge cases.
Dana Fried
Irenes (many)
@tess we do think you're right about this we have friends who've chosen to approach this from the documentation angle (cf. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/essential-randomness/the-fujoshi-guide-to-web-development/description ) and we do hope that will help but it sure would be nice if the core git people would, like, loop in a tech writer for advice on names and conceptual organization and then actually take their advice
Fizzy Logic
@tess I miss the simplicity of SVN. Sure, it didnβt have a local copy of the entire damned repo, but who cares. Commit in SVN to a remote server does what I need, without the βare you sure?β semantics of commit+push.
The Modesto Kid
@tess there's got to be a shareware WinGit out there somewhere with a crudely implemented File Manager overlay to your repository
Orc
"3. Okay, you actually wanna do development? Then learn git. The names confuse you. You end up fucking up your source tree six times before you learn reflog." Oh, so there's a way to unfuck a git repository other than blowing it away and {restoring it from time machine/blowing it away and cloning one of your remote repositories}?  
Luna Saphira Dragofelis
@tess I think the only reason git is used is that it was the best open source source control when it was developed, and by now it's so entrenched barely anyone bothers with alternatives
Tony Byrne
@tess Agree! Git is actually a Masterclass in obfuscation. Source Control is tricky enough to grok, thereβs no need for the tooling to make it harder. Then thereβs the obtuseness of telling you that thereβs a command similar to what youβve typed instead of just running it.
Jake Mannix
we need to normalize "feeling like an idiot with git". I have been using git since... 2008 or so? I *never* rebase, I basically use maybe 7 commands: clone, checkout (sometimes with -t) fetch, pull, commit (often! all the time!), merge, push. If anything breaks, start over from scratch on a new clone and move over files I want to keep one by one Git sucks, but I ignore everything complex about it, and pretend it is unable to do anything other than the above 7 commands, no variation
LΓ‘szlΓ³ Kupcsik
@tess  
skry
@tess I donβt even want to write software. I want to maintain a medium-sized static website. Git is an insurmountable obstacle, despite my familiarity with making websites. Gitlab added 5x the clicks to my workflow, also unusable by me. Way too much metawork. Give me SFTP and a staging area, any day. Sorry, now Iβm ranting in your mentions :)
Mallory π³οΈββ§οΈ:freebsd_logo:
@tess After more than 10 years of teaching git, I think the biggest barrier to understanding is that git hides its internal model from users. If git showed the current state of its internal model and each command explained how it manipulates the internal model, git would be much much easier to learn and use. One day I'd like to write a new porcelain for git that puts these ideas into practice. 
Doctor Memory
@tess git: βoh, you thought βworse is betterβ was some kind of clever metaphor??β
rhempel
@tess Hmmm - I am very comfortable with git but the comments here have inspired me to ask more questions of new users. That being said I DID mess up source trees in the beginning until someone really explained what was going on. It's actually a LOT simpler than most tutorials would have you believe. Until you get to submodules. I'm working on my moving a team from svn to git and will approach it as if they don't know anything about it - and will support them as much as I can.
Chris Fjell
@tess
Chris Fjell
@tess 
Richard Hendricks
@tess It's such a weird ass tool in that it is terrifying for a novice and so weirdly safe for an expert. And oh god, don't even get started with submodules. They seem like the perfect answer but they are just a giant baseball bat heading to the back of your skull on any non-trivial project. I've been on multiple large projects that went monorepo -> submodules -> weeping -> back to monorepo.
CodeByJeff
@tess git wasted an hour of my life today just because I'll bring cupcakes. Tell me where we're meeting to plan the revolution.
Yellow Flag
@tess Iβm an experienced developer, I tried using git multiple times throughout my career, and I always had to give up. Itβs extremely counterintuitive, the only way to use it seems to be memorizing a bunch of commonly used commands. Which is why I always end up using Mercurial and accessing Git repositories via hg-git. π€·ββοΈ 
rich
@tess omg this π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π―π― 
Γlbaum
@tess Iβm very comfortable with git as well (Iβve been using it every for 14 years,) and I completely agree with you. I had to start with a GUI (the excellent Tower) just to know which of the unrelated flavours of βresetβ I had to use in each situation. And I already understood the VCS concepts from CVS and SVN, and the distributed concepts from Mercurial. As you said, grouping is terrible, syntax is awfully designed (update-ref anyone?) and discoverability is zero. >>
Paul Rosen
@tess I can't wait for git to be "disrupted". Vite replaced webpack in a year. It can happen. 
Nicholas Weaver
@tess
nthcdr
@tess Using #git with #magit in #emacs is one of lifes pleasure for me. I've gone through a multitude of source code management tools before git stole the show and I don't long for any of them. I get that the git command line can be frustrating. But that fix is just a few aliases away anyway, so why bother getting upset. Also most people settle on a few of the commands for 99 percent of their usage. It's not like you need to memorize all possible flags and variations. |
Gregory's Server
@tess git honestly makes me question whether or not Iβm a good developer
I can only imagine how that plays out for folks without my straight-white-dude privilege