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0 pointsthrow0101c1y ago0 comments

>> Git[‘s] UI is atrocious. […] Over time, I taught non-computer people who used Windows all of CVS, Subversion, and Mercurial.

> Well, that’s in the eye of the beholder. […]

I would say it is not.

Usability testing is a thing, and products can get better and worse scores when trying to do the same task / reach the same result. I'm not aware of any published studies on the topic, but I would not be surprised if Git got lower scores than Hg on UI/UX, even though they can basically do the same thing (distributed development).

Given the GP trained people on multiple version control systems, including another distributed one (hg), and people mostly had a problem with Git, I would say Git is the problem.

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gumby1y ago

I am unable to do anything with Photoshop beyond starting it and exiting. I have no idea how or even what it does beyond somehow modifying photos. That’s not photoshop’s problem, it’s that I don’t know what I’m doing. So I just don’t use it.

I only hear git complaints from people who don’t have an internal model that reflects what git is doing (I’ll agree that it uses a couple — but only a couple — of terms in a way that might violate some people’s intuitive model). But if you know what you want to accomplish the command line is pretty unremarkable.

But when you don’t know how the tool works you easily get snarled. And when you blindly resort to various “cheat sheet” sites it’s a crap shoot whether you “fix” your problem (how would you know?) or make things worse. That’s like me with photoshop.

I used to see this with CVS too

throw0101a1y ago

> I am unable to do anything with Photoshop beyond starting it and exiting. I have no idea how or even what it does beyond somehow modifying photos. That’s not photoshop’s problem, it’s that I don’t know what I’m doing. So I just don’t use it.

As stated up-thread:

> Over time, I taught non-computer people who used Windows all of CVS, Subversion, and Mercurial. They got each one and why things were better. The first time they had to recover something, they really got it. Source control got out of their way and was generally fine.

Seems that things only got hard(er) teaching people with Git.

> I only hear git complaints from people who don’t have an internal model that reflects what git is doing

Yeah, every time someone says that:

> git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space.

* Isaac Wolkerstorfer, https://twitter.com/agnoster/status/44636629423497217

In the past I have used RCS, CVS, and Subversion. I never had to learn any kind of internal model for any of them.

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