I'm waking up to a lot of Discourse on here about Git so of course here's my take:
I am increasingly uninterested in saying that tools are "good" or "bad”. It's all just so contextual.
But I can't think of a tool that I've used as long (over 10 years I think?) and as frequently (daily), that frustrates me this much and that I make bad mistakes with this regularly (monthly at least). Something about Git just DOES NOT fit my brain. (This is not an invitation to explain git to me!!)
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@jacob Something I find fascinating is that this is not an uncommon feeling about git, and yet it is by far the most popular tool of its type. Most tools that are as difficult to use as git is would be thrown away, but git somehow is powerful enough or entrenched enough or something to avoid that, and that’s sort of amazing.
@flooey @jacob fast. git is real fast. Almost every alternative (except hg) was remarkably slower. But, also, DVCS is full of hard subjects... none of them are very easy, when it comes to doing complicated things. Not defending git; I also find it frustrating. But I was around for the fights over what comes next after CVS/Subversion and git won mostly fair and square.
@flooey I definitely don't know. I've heard it explained as an example of "worse is better" but I don't buy it. I think that's dismissive and reductionist. It's probably more of the case that Git has a whole bunch of great features that are good enough to make it worth using even for people who find it frustrating.
@jacob @flooey as someone who has frequently described git this way this makes me think I should change my rhetoric, because to my mind the whole deal of the “worse is better” essay is an enumeration of great features that UNIX had which Lisp smugly ignored, which had greater practical impact than the hypothetically-better fundamentals of Symbolics’ architecture. Lisp/bzr had stuff I wanted one day, unix/git had stuff that I (and everyone else) actually needed immediately
@jacob @flooey it is a classic. Worth reading in its entirely, although I should strongly say I do not agree with all of its conclusions: https://dreamsongs.com/WIB.html
@flooey @jacob I got asked by a class of computer science students last week what my favorite version control system is. I was like "I'm not sure favorite is relevant. I liked bzr since it's distributed like git but easier to use, but it doesn't handle big codebases. CVS and SVN didn't have local commits, so that was a pain. But at the end of the day, git won. That's what everyone uses now, so that's what you have to know."