I love Git, but with the huge caveat that it is relative love - relative to the universe of garbage software trying to perform complex tasks. I think it has a few glaring issues (the reset command and the overloaded pages of the official docs come to mind), but I also think 80% of the criticism aimed at the design or CLI of Git is undeserved or misapplied. E.g., here's my quick critique of some of the points under the "alien mental model" part:
> A commit is its entire worldline
> Commit content is both a snapshot and a patch
> Branches aren't quite branches, they're more like little bookmark go-karts
These are three versions of the same fallacy - technically correct, but only in the same sense that a text file is "both text and ones-and-zeroes", or "not text, but actually ones-and-zeroes". The author is pointing at different abstraction layers, some of which aren't even necessary parts of the user mental model. If you don't yet understand concepts like "abstraction layers" or "implementation details" (e.g. the difference between "a branch is a series of commits" and "a branch is represented by a pointer to a commit, which, by the definition of a tree, resolves deterministically to a series of commits"), then you will have this problem with any software that gives you power to work on a complex problem like version control.
> Merge conflicts are actually just difficult
If your version control system makes merge conflicts easy/rare in the absolute sense, then it is doing dangerous/cute "idiot-proofing" that will bite you at some point.
In summary, I think a good chunk of complaints about Git are actually just complaints about version control (i.e. Git is hard because version control is hard), or unnecessary combinations of different abstraction layers (which, to be fair, most software/documentation hides better from the user, but IMHO that is a bad thing). Git is an amazing piece of software (relatively speaking).
I love Git, but with the huge caveat that it is relative love - relative to the universe of garbage software trying to perform complex tasks. I think it has a few glaring issues (the reset command and the overloaded pages of the official docs come to mind), but I also think 80% of the criticism aimed at the design or CLI of Git is undeserved or misapplied. E.g., here's my quick critique of some of the points under the "alien mental model" part:
> A commit is its entire worldline
> Commit content is both a snapshot and a patch
> Branches aren't quite branches, they're more like little bookmark go-karts
These are three versions of the same fallacy - technically correct, but only in the same sense that a text file is "both text and ones-and-zeroes", or "not text, but actually ones-and-zeroes". The author is pointing at different abstraction layers, some of which aren't even necessary parts of the user mental model. If you don't yet understand concepts like "abstraction layers" or "implementation details" (e.g. the difference between "a branch is a series of commits" and "a branch is represented by a pointer to a commit, which, by the definition of a tree, resolves deterministically to a series of commits"), then you will have this problem with any software that gives you power to work on a complex problem like version control.
> Merge conflicts are actually just difficult
If your version control system makes merge conflicts easy/rare in the absolute sense, then it is doing dangerous/cute "idiot-proofing" that will bite you at some point.
In summary, I think a good chunk of complaints about Git are actually just complaints about version control (i.e. Git is hard because version control is hard), or unnecessary combinations of different abstraction layers (which, to be fair, most software/documentation hides better from the user, but IMHO that is a bad thing). Git is an amazing piece of software (relatively speaking).