Published 2025-03-31
tag(s): #failures #programming #yell-at-cloud
Git is mysterious - not in good ways.
We intuitively know that sometimes the best tool (yes, I know "best" is extremely nebulous) isn't necessarily the most popular. There are other factors that make something into a standard, like availability, price (where applies), complexity, etc.
I think Git is proof that people would take anything as long as it is free. Then again, Mercurial was right there...[1]
We all have "that friend", who is a really smart person, and unfortunately fell for some fake news/some conspiracy theory/scam. And the lesson there is one of humility: "it can happen to me, too".
Well, "10x developers" and "tech bros" will never admit it, but the fact that we keep using git, to me, is proof that they too can fall for cargo culting.
For the record, I am not saying Git is bad. It is impressively good. But it really
should be one of those "it gets out of the way" tools, and it definitely isn't.
There's a reason pages like this one exist.
Git's ergonomics are terrible. There's 3984209389 commands, and sometimes the same command
does completely different things by changing one flag.
This rant was brought to you by: "today I learned about git rebase --onto, and I
used it and things went horribly wrong. So I discarded my local branch, started fresh, and the
same command just worked. Obviously I did something different without realizing, but
what, how...oh, remember that xkcd about git? I should
totally vent about Git in my own site".