> Certain systems can best be understood as black boxes. You put some commands in and magic happens. Git was not designed to be such a system and early users of git know this.
This is true. A less favorable reading of the same story is "Certain systems are designed so well that they can be understood as black boxes. You put some commands in and magic happens. Git was not designed as well and instead requires that user to fully understand its internal workings or risk running into trouble".
My theory is that people are so proud that they finally mastered git that they like to forget that it simply has a horrible UI (and by that i mean the CLI and the design of the core set of commands).
I know of only one other popular productivity tool that has a similar sense of "you need to learn how it thinks, deep inside, or stuff will mess up" and that's Microsoft Word¹. I haven't seen shares of MS Word geeks loudly heralding its awesomeness here on HN yet. Maybe hackers just don't write documents? I can't come up with any other reason.
¹) Word works great once you learn how to use its styles (a bit like CSS classes), its fields, and its cross-reference system. MS Word's font and paragraph buttons are there in the toolbar to lure you to the dark side, or something. Don't use them! Friends don't let friends touch Word's font settings from anywhere but the styles editor. Like Git's, MS Word's UI is awful (awful) but its internals is like CSS-done-right for paper documents.
This is true. A less favorable reading of the same story is "Certain systems are designed so well that they can be understood as black boxes. You put some commands in and magic happens. Git was not designed as well and instead requires that user to fully understand its internal workings or risk running into trouble".
My theory is that people are so proud that they finally mastered git that they like to forget that it simply has a horrible UI (and by that i mean the CLI and the design of the core set of commands).
I know of only one other popular productivity tool that has a similar sense of "you need to learn how it thinks, deep inside, or stuff will mess up" and that's Microsoft Word¹. I haven't seen shares of MS Word geeks loudly heralding its awesomeness here on HN yet. Maybe hackers just don't write documents? I can't come up with any other reason.
¹) Word works great once you learn how to use its styles (a bit like CSS classes), its fields, and its cross-reference system. MS Word's font and paragraph buttons are there in the toolbar to lure you to the dark side, or something. Don't use them! Friends don't let friends touch Word's font settings from anywhere but the styles editor. Like Git's, MS Word's UI is awful (awful) but its internals is like CSS-done-right for paper documents.