But I'm a user of it - it works even if I don't understand exactly how and nobody tells me that I learned using the mouse "the wrong way" because of it.
A version control system is tackling a non-trivial problem. Go learn it properly, otherwise you'll be one of the 'users' that, at best, will be stumped on trivial issues, losing productivity and running to others for help. At worst, you'll be making bad decisions and dragging down your team.
Would you also say that you don't need to learn anything and can just "guess" while working with a programming language?
I have no problem with people on my team asking each other for help, and I definitely don't consider it bad for productivity when they do. If someone on my team suggested people asking them for help was bad I would bring it up in their next one to one because that's a really bad sign something is wrong.
If everyone on my team decided to learn the internals of git so they didn't need to ask one another when a problem arose I would be genuinely concerned about how the team is working.
Git is 100x more complex, if not more.
Give me a break. I'm sick of people glamorizing the idea that you should have your hand held through each step of every tool you use and never expend any effort on becoming an expert in the tools of your trade. Git is an engineering tool, designed by and for professionals. Imagine this kind of obscene complatency in other fields.
There's often sentiment that people should know more, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone saying starting programming from high level is "the wrong way".
Example from out of it: doctors learn both how to use USG and how it works. But in every case, I've seen it in that order: practice, then internals.
You're talking to the wrong crowd with me, you know. I disagree with this approach, too. Maybe we start with "hello world" to get a taste, but the first thing we should do is start breaking it down.
$ git remote -v
But to show all branches it's
$ git branch -a
It's like it's been purposefully designed to be obtuse.
`git remote` and `git branch` list the remotes and branches respectively.
Adding -v makes both of these verbose. It will additionally show what each branch/remote is "pointing at".
Adding -a to `git branch` shows remote tracking branches in additional to local branches. This not normally interesting so the default is to list only local branches.
There's plenty of weirdness in Git, but honestly my main complaint is that the interface is awful and the documentation makes Dostoyevski look modern and sleek.
But the argument is being put forward that to understand the command lines you have to understand the internals.
But you do need to understand that the mousepad doesn't correspond to points on the screen, and you have to learn to treat it more like a treadmill than anything else. Going back in time and thinking about it from a rollerball perspective can help with that -- new users have a tendency to use something like 90% more space because they don't grok that for long movements they have to pick up the mouse.
People are bringing up the mouse as simple because they're used to using mice. But hand anyone a mouse for the first time and you'll find out that they aren't simple. They're just doing comparatively less than Git, so the problem space is slightly easier to tackle. And that's even ignoring the hand-eye coordination problem we take for granted, and that can take weeks for someone new to computers to get over.
Talking about internal mechanics is broadly useful when teaching computer literacy -- everything from mice, to copy/cut-paste, to shift-selection of files, to the file browser itself benefits from trying to build a systemic, mental model of some kind of behind-the-scenes abstraction.
The only difference is that grasping the cursor will probably take you minutes because it's a simple concept, and grasping the data structure takes a bit more effort because it's just a more complicated topic.
You don't need to know the implementation details of git, but you need to know the data structure it operates on, cause otherwise you're just walking in the dark.
Who knows, maybe Linus will have another epiphany, while Microsoft somehow mismanages GitHub and squanders all the goodwill away. Then, a group of upstarts...
That said, wanting to learn git's internals for the sake of knowledge is fine as motivation.
Maybe if I play my cards right, I'll use git for the rest of my career. If not, maybe there will be something new eventually, but I imagine that the concepts learned in mastering Git would still be useful.
Every one of the projects that I interact with regularly are in a Git repo on some kind of Git hosting service and the projects are run by people who understand/use Git regularly. For those projects, switching to Mercurial is a net loss, even just considering the time it takes to migrate the codebase + related processes (think CI, issue queue integration, even the repo hosting itself).
Sure, I could use hg-git, but that doesn't gain me much either: now I'm the guy with the weird setup. If something goes wrong with my setup, it's too weird for other people to help with. If something goes wrong with somebody else's setup, I'm not that helpful because I have a weird setup.
Mercurial works great, has a sane CLI and can both manipulate and interoperate with git repos.
Many of the tools mentioned, at their core, are manipulating the same DAG data structures.
What do Google and FB use as their VCS? Also, any source? I don't mean this to be an attack, I am just genuinely amazed by the statement.
https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stor...