Its probably a rhetorical question but I think its worth answering anyway.

Experienced developers had the luxury of learning git, say, over a 10 year period. I certainly know a lot more git than 10 years ago.

If you are a new developer thrown into your first real project and Intellij handles git for you so that you can concentrate on being productive then learning command line git takes a back seat.

I see this in many aspects of programming. One thing I am struggling with currently, is that JHipster generates applications in a user friendly way. JHipster is highly productive and seems like the future of programming BUT it means that there will be a generation of programmers that do not understand the MB of Spring Java code that is casually puked out by the code generator.

Its depressing to say it, but I think not understanding the tools is only natural and is probably the new normal in this age of complexity.

The depressing thing is I'm not talking just about off-the-shelf newbies, I'm also talking about experienced devs.

>Its depressing to say it, but I think not understanding the tools is only natural and is probably the new normal in this age of complexity.

Yes, unfortunately, this is becoming the new normal. But what is the next "new normal" after this? More complexity and obscurity? How long can we keep building that house of cards before it collapses upon us?

I use the basic git commands a lot but the wider set not very often.

So maybe I should learn Git from first principles every year? Like a cop would practice at the firing range?

But I’m doing that on my own time. But then what about the 1000 other things from Dockerfiles, to Relational database query plan optimisation, to the latest azure cloud offerings, to the newest React library for managing state, etc. etc.

The "cognitive burden" of git comes as much from the tasks that it is occasionally required to make possible than anything else.

If the only git commands you ever use are push, pull, commit and checkout then its a very simple system with very little cognitive burden. But one day, you may need to perform a truly complex task with git that a simpler system with much less cognitive burden would just not allow.

I do not understand how "data interchange formats" are an issue here. What do you want to inter-operate with?

Note that we're specifically discussing the theoretical reason for git's usability woes. The costs of actually fixing them in git aren't trivial, of course.

We'll see if JHipster and their ilk are really the new building blocks. A lot of the older RAD development tools have also gone the way of the dinosaur. For sure the new primitives will be higher level and allow us to build more complex applications, it's just a matter of time before we'll find our which ones have to most expressive power and ergonomics, and which turn out to be giant hairballs.

It is literally impossible for us to understand how everything we use works. We expect a compiler to just compile things and work; nobody is ranting about how modern developers are lazy because they can't hand-verify the compiler is outputting the right opcodes. Nobody is ranting about how web developers are lazy because they can't debug a browser runtime and its interface to the OS's rendering primitives. Can some people do those things? Sure. Do we imply character flaws for the 98% of developers who have focused on other things? No.

If this old-man-yells-at-clouds, good-enough-for-grandpa-so-its-good-enough-for-me style were the dominant approach in our industry, we'd still be working with punch cards and fanfold printer output. Thank goodness it isn't. Instead of having a million developers adapt to git, git should adapt to the million developers and free up their time for doing something that actually matters to a user.

How should git adapt? Can you get a simpler model than this? Is really a basic structure like a tree so complicated millions of developers are having a hard time with it?

Nobody is advocating for "dont use new stuff, old is betteer". Nobody is advocating for people to hand-check compiler outputs (unless your analogy pertains to people who work in a GUI tool that shows them pretty pictures for opcodes and they check if the pictures match).

You've missed the point.

The point is "try to understand the basics of the tool you are using".

If me wanting people to learn and understand more makes me an asshole, so be it.

I'd rather be an asshole and help people learn more and understand more than coddle them in the safety of the pretty buttons and say "it's ok, you don't have to understand".

If we don't understand our tools and the problems they solve, how will we make progress?

How will we make better tools?

How will we make better software?

How do you learn and grow if not by understanding what you don't?

That you can't tell the difference between "let's make software more usable" and "nobody should learn anything ever again and just soften into blobs of undifferentiated protoplasm" seems like a you problem.

Git is a very complicated, bloated command line. Frankly, most of the day-to-day can easily be done with a high level understanding and a GUI. There is no shame in not knowing the minutiae of git.

The goal of being a programmer is to produce cool things, not to duel with your tooling.

So much so that you can write your own basic version of git in a couple of hours: https://wyag.thb.lt/

Yes, you can write C without understanding poinnters, you can paint without understanding colors and how they mix, draw without knowing difference between 3H and 2B, use a drill without knowing which type of head is for what.

But try doing it long term and you either gotta learn those things or your output will be limited and clear expression of your vision will be harder.

I'm not advocating for people to learn git from scratch.

I'm advocating for understanding - not low level, at least high level.

And is it better to go through a "how to use X tool in Y GUI" tutorial or how to use "X tool" and then gain immediate understanding of what Y does? What if you switch GUI's? Which knowledge will be sticking?

The same applies to the git CLI. And really, to git. The right tool for a small group C-using kernel developers 15 years ago may not be the right tool for different people doing different things today. Let's hope it goes the way of C.

My experience is that knowing the DAG in GIT is equivalent to needing to know pointers to write effective C.

Knowing the internals is more like needing to know assembly in C. Yes, it can be really useful for debugging certain classes of problems, but not really necessary in day-to-day work.

I've used git professionally for 4 years now and haven't once run into a corrupted repo or a problem googling for help couldn't solve. Day to day driver is TortoiseGit, which is frankly just a shitty TortoiseSVN skin on top of git. But I like being able to visually see the graph since at the end of the day I'm doing graph operations when manipulating the repo.

It sounds a lot like you mean low-level, not high-level, though?

There’s more than enough to be achieved by just knowing the tree concept of git, and using a GUI to visualize it while running the basics - checkout, commit, branch, rebase, etc.

Oh, that's exactly what I meant. At least basic, high level understanding of the git model and basic operations on it. But most people never even get to rebasing or try do understand what lies behind magical buttons in the GUI.

It's hard to see the gaps someone else has, and wonder why they can't know what you know, but they may have some deep knowledge in a domain you are only superficially knowledgable in.

I agree we need to nail the basics, but this isn't 2002 anymore, and we don't ship Gold CDs to customers by running a build command on a single PC in the office. Our jobs are so much more complex and multi-faceted, and the oldbeard assumption that things are 'bare essentials' is eroded by the pragmatic realisation that we only have so many hours in the day.

You can use top-down knowledge to inform yourself on what concepts you need to learn, and you can ignore the parts of the domain you need right now. But you still have to learn them bottom up. Getting confused by the concepts you're using is a gigantic waste of time.

And the harder the concepts, the easier it is to get confused, so there's no trade-off.

Actually, I'm trying to look at it more from a "shallow sea" perspective - you have a problem and are given a tool to solve it. But do you not dive in just a bit to see "hey what is this tool" after you solve the problem?

Or after using it for a while?

UI is also something you have to learn how to use.

Sourcetree UI is as complicated as terminal for someone who never used it.

>I have to deliver products and deliverables, when and what do I focus on wrt gaps in my knowledge? Git? Unix commands? OWASP Security principles? Cache busting? global state management? ORM integrations with popular DBs? Kubernetes configs?

With that mentality, what do you ever learn?

Do you just keep on chugging year after year with "duct-tape the tools"?

Where is the joy in that? Where is the growth?

Are you always in a rush to deliver software without a moment to think?

You learn about the level you're using - like, are you using git daily? Just reading a tutorial or two and spending 5 mins a day with it in the terminal is going to do wonders for understanding it long-term.

>Barely understanding many fundamental tools is common these days for devs

It's common for someone starting to develop or starting to use a tool - hell, 8 years ago I have been as confused as "wtf is this git" as anyone.

Gradle was magic to me. Terminal was a dark and scary place.

That doesn't mean that it is okay to stay at that level.

If we accept "not trying to understand" as the new common, then we accept failure and ignorance as the new common.

We accept the world of broken software because people don't understand what they're doing - and we're telling them "you don't need to understand so don't even bother".

And hell, maybe that's gatekeeping, but fuck it, I'll rather be St. Peter at the gates than accept a world where learning and understanding is something "we don't have time for".

> With that mentality, what do you ever learn?

The way I understand it, this comment is saying you have to prioritize and work on the highest-impact areas. Of course you grow, but until a certain point you don't benefit much from knowing the guts of git more than Framework X.

I have never experienced any joy of creativity from using git, so it's not something I'm putting high on my list. Heck, learning Rust was 10x as good for my development as git, so I don't regret prioritizing that way.

I expect (hope?) that most people understand the git they use in their daily workflow... but that doesn't mean they have to have mastered every dark corner. Find a specialist (Stack Overflow :) when an unusual situation arises. If it's happening consistently, then I agree some more learning should occur.

>With that mentality, what do you ever learn?

>Where is the joy in that? Where is the growth?

>Are you always in a rush to deliver software without a moment to think?

There's nothing sexy about learning git commands for me

I'd rather spend that time on actual computer science fundamentals or even reading stuff like HTTP RFC than learning git quirks