Irrlicht Engine

People have said that Git is only for super smart people. Even Andrew Morton said Git is "expressly designed to make you feel less intelligent than you thought you were." What's your response to this?

Torvalds: So I think it used to be true but isn't any more. There is a few reasons people feel that way, but I think only one of them remains. The one that remains is fairly simple: "you can do things so many ways."

You can do a lot of things with git, and many of the rules of what you *should* do are not so much technical limitations but are about what works well when working together with other people. So git is a very powerful set of tools, and that can not only be overwhelming at first, it also means that you can often do the same (or similar) things different ways, and they all "work." Generally, the best way to learn git is probably to first only do very basic things and not even look at some of the things you can do until you are familiar and confident about the basics.

There's a few historical reasons for why git was considered complicated. One of them is that it was complicated. The people who started using git very early on in order to work on the kernel really had to learn a very rough set of scripts to make everything work. All the effort had been on making the core technology work and very little on making it easy or obvious. So git (deservedly) had a reputation for requiring you to know exactly what you did early on. But that was mainly true for the first 6 months or a year.

The other big reason people thought git was hard is that git is very different. There are people who used things like CVS for a decade or two, and git is not CVS. Not even close. The concepts are different. The commands are different. Git never even really tried to look like CVS, quite the reverse. And if you've used a CVS-like system for a long time, that makes git appear complicated and needlessly different. People were put off by the odd revision numbers. Why is a git revision not "1.3.1" with nice incrementing numbers like it was in CVS? Why is it that odd scary 40-character HEX number?

But git wasn't "needlessly different." The differences are required. It's just that it made some people really think it was more complicated than it is, because they came from a very different background. The "CVS background" thing is going away. By now there are probably lots of programmers out there who have never used CVS in their lives and would find the CVS way of doing things very confusing, because they learned git first.

CuteAlien wrote:Yeah, gives me a little more time figuring out how to work with git without swearing all the time (using it now in a project, but still struggling... haven't really figured out yet why so many people prefer this to mercurial).