Re: Considering teaching plumbing to users harmful

[Dmitry Potapov <dpotapov@gmail.com>]

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