On 10/31/15, Matt Welland <[email protected]> wrote: > > Regarding git, other than it's arcane interface (i) the you are paying in > learning curve for the additional power that comes from the extra degrees > of freedom it provides. A developer willing to invest the time to deeply > understand git will likely garner some benefits from that additional power.
I'll argue that Git is not beneficial even to people who have mastered its arcane syntax. Here's why: In common usage, Git requires the user to remember the following states: (1) The files being editing in the working directory (2) The files in the staging area (3) The files local repository head (4) The files local copy of the remote repository head (5) The files in the remote repository head Git contains commands for comparing and moving content between all of these different places. That's a lot to keep in mind. Everybody has finite brain capacity. (Some people have more brain capacity than others, but it is still always finite.) The more brain power a developer devotes to keeping track of the VCS, the less is available for working on the application or for solve real problems. To this end, a VCS ought to minimize the amount of state that the developer must remember. Git does a perfectly awful job of minimizing the amount of state that the developer must remember. With the possible exception of ClearCase, I don't know of any other VCS that requires the user to remember as much state as does Git. And since this extra state detracts from solving the problem at hand, that makes Git a bad VCS, in my opinion. -- D. Richard Hipp [email protected] _______________________________________________ fossil-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.fossil-scm.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fossil-users
