Re: Considering teaching plumbing to users harmful

From: Dmitry Potapov <dpotapov@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 16, 2008, 22:24 UTC
Message-ID: <20080716222458.GH2925@dpotapov.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <32541b130807161229ob4c21cbsc6c86ee3e42c4101@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 03:29:39PM -0400, Avery Pennarun wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> 
> I find it interesting how git usability discussions tend to go.  It
> usually starts out by someone saying, "Look, git really isn't that
> hard to learn, just do it like this..." and then someone says, "But
> actually, that's still really complicated.  Everyone thinks xxx other
> VCS is easier to learn.  Here's how they do it..."

Everyone thinks so? Somehow, I don't, and there are people who think that Git is easily to learn if you teach it properly.

> And then someone
> says, "Yeah, but xxx VCS sucks!" and that somehow makes it okay that
> git is empirically harder to learn than xxx VCS, as anyone can see by
> browsing the web.

Browsing the web is not an empirical study. And if you say harder, you should specify to whom. To those who already know xxx VCS, naturally anything new or different than what you got used to will be difficult at the beginning. Naturally, it is easier to learn something if there are more books and articles about it, or just there are more people who can answer on any your questions. But with everything else being equal, do you really believe that SVN or CVS is easier to use than Git if we speak about learning comparable functionality? What is your argument for that? "svn update"? Well, it is a sure way to make mess in your working directoy. So, your argument does not sound very convincing.

Dmitry