Sometimes I just don't git it. But I'm not alone

OK, I feel better about myself today. Here is quote from Brian Kernighan:

"I wish I understood git better, but in spite of your help, I still don't have a proper understanding, so this may take a while."

(Unix legend, who owes us nothing, keeps fixing foundational AWK code | Ars Technica)

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About git: it’s true, sometimes it feels like the assembly language of software version control. In graphviz, using git was one of several difficult arguments that John Ellson won (eventually), by getting us to try it, and then pointing out that, despite technical arguments pro and con it had already won the hearts and minds of the community, so if we wanted to be part of that community, it was in our best interest to accept that. Which leads us to…

About the Unix room philosophy: it breaks my heart a little when I read or see interviews in which Unix room heavies like Brian at least seem to believe that the main contribution of Unix was the power and simplicity of its shell and command line tools. We do admire those things, but the world has basically voted that down and moved on. What Unix did was to create a culture of software creation and sharing that has endured until now. It pains me when experts even disparage other work by that community that took it further, e.g. python. I’m trying to finish a blog article on this.

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sometimes it feels like the assembly language of software version control

It even has high level code and low level code that it calls “porcelain” :wink:

I feel like Git is one of those tools that is a game changer but has a very steep learning curve. Sometimes I find I need some advanced operation that I’d always previously thought of as esoteric. Then I realise Linus et al already came across this need and implemented it in Git (just yesterday, I learned --force-with-lease). I’m not aware of a better way of dealing with concurrent feature development in a large code base than Git.

despite technical arguments pro and con it had already won the hearts and minds of the community

I genuinely mourn this. Mercurial gives you 90% of Git’s functionality in a simpler box that has fewer sharp edges. But despite this, cargo culting convinced everyone Git was the only solution to their problems. There’s a parallel future where we could have got something like the web browser polyculture instead of the Git monoculture we have.

I’m trying to finish a blog article on this.

Looking forward to reading this :slight_smile:

I’m trying to finish a blog article on this.

Can’t wait. Please forward link when fully cooked!

“I wish I understood git better” me too Brian.

On a side note, Brian is one of the good ones, a gentleman and a scholar. IIRC (Stephen?), he helped edit some of the early Graphviz documentation just because he wanted to.