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Comment by behnamoh

2 days ago

Git is one of those technologies that I never got to wrap my head around of, because in so many ways it doesn't follow intuition and unless you have been using it for a long time, for literally every action you would probably have to Google or use the man page of the command.

As everyone knows, though, Git gets easier once you understand branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space.

  • > homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space

    Has to be easier to understand that then all the arbitrary git commands.

    • Git commands, while they may be cryptic, actually mean something. Whereas that was just gibberish made by putting random mathematical words together.

      (There is a similar sounding joke about category theory, "A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors" but this sentence has a mathematical meaning.)

  • Unless you’re in a detached HEAD, in which case it’s xylomorphic to the left-aligned Galois group of R^3.

Did you start with Git or have you used other VCS systems before? I started with SVN and then coming to Git, there were obviously things to learn about how it was different but honestly it felt to me like it made things easier in many ways (since I'd experienced the horror of a very large codebase in SVN with lots of branches, and trying to track those and merge back together - git is so much better at that, it's crazy)...

I can see how it would be a much bigger learning curve if people come straight to git, but it's still hard for me to understand where the blocker is that so many people complain about using it...

I was trying to delete a file from history yesterday.

The built in way (filter-branch) pops up a warning, with a long delay, saying you should hit Control+C and go download a third party python script called filter-repo...

  • Possibly consider that "deleting a file from history" is rather far outside the norm or recommended practice for git (even though it is, of course, entirely possible)

    • > even though it is, of course, entirely possible

      I take the more realistic perspective: until git makes it impossible to commit something that shouldn't have been, like a secret, then deleting a file from history is a fundamental requirement of git.

      3 replies →

It's ok mate. Hackernews says we should be using jj to manage our rewritten-in-Rust code.

  • Since you brought it up, I personally switched to jujutsu and prefer it greatly. I regularly help coworkers deal with issues in git and keep dropping hints like `in jujutsu this would've been done way easier like this!`. Nobody bites yet since I think most of them don't want to use the CLI but maybe someday if enough people keep talking about it the inertia will get to the point that we can get some really slick GUIs for jj.