On 29/02/2016 17:24, Greg Wilson wrote:
The biggest thing I'm taking away from this blog post is that lousy
interfaces and obscure failure modes really are inhibiting adoption of
better computing practices. From the post:
...
I heard fewer complaints of this kind, and believe that I saw higher
adoption rates, when we were teaching Subversion. I'm not going to
recommend that we switch back, but I do miss it whenever I have to help
someone deal with a detached head...
Version control is probably a bit particular in that
1) The most popular tool is also the worst in terms of UI.
2) The concepts need some time to understand, which is difficult when
teaching from zero do advanced level in two days without time for
practicing.
When I teach version control in short courses, some students always end
up frustrated. I do hear comments such as "This is too complicated for
me, I will never learn it".
I have had much better success introducing beginners to version control
very slowly. I start showing them the most basic commands to keep file
histories on their own machine. No branching, no collaboration. And I
use Mercurial. This has always led to success in the sense that people
start to use version control for their work.
A few of those people later switched to Git in order to participate in
collaborations on GitHub. Most are still quitely using Mercurial on
their own machines.
I suppose one could teach Git in the same way, but I didn't try. I
believe the important part is to start with a minimal useful level of
version control, and let practice do the rest. That's of course not
possible in a two-day intensive workshop.
Konrad.
_______________________________________________
Discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
