Comments on Thomas Ferris Nicolaisen's blog: Some thoughts on Git vs complexity

Thanks for commenting Christoph! Yeah, I could ha...

2011-12-01T23:08:38.044+01:00

Thanks for commenting Christoph!

Yeah, I could have tried to write a clearer message, but this post was a bit more thinking-out-loud-writing :)

Appelo's model is interesting. Thanks for the pointer!

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, as a git novice ...

2011-12-01T10:41:25.233+01:00

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, as a git novice I appreciate them. However, I found your use of "simple" versus "complex" somehow confusing. I think Jurgen Appelo has found a helpful interpretation of these terms. Maybe you like it as well :-) http://www.noop.nl/2010/09/simplicity-a-new-model.html

Hi Sam, thanks for commenting! I'm already a ...

2011-11-27T15:17:58.961+01:00

Hi Sam, thanks for commenting!

I'm already a big fan of your Git guide, came across it some time ago. I really appreciate the style of it, and how it's aimed at beginners. Thanks for creating it!

Interesting. I ran across this tangentially (I wro...

2011-11-27T07:37:09.747+01:00

Interesting. I ran across this tangentially (I wrote a site based on my experiences trying to learn Git, and was vanity-surfing for links to it, and noticed this at http://coder.io/tag/git). That's a really useful distinction (simple vs. easy) that I'll have to try to incorporate into my own thinking, so thanks for that!

You're absolutely right to place Git in the "simple but hard" category. I spent my first year or two flailing around, cargo-culting incantations, and generally wasting a lot of time because I didn't grok the model. Unfortunately, while there are a lot of Git enthusiasts, the number of people who seem to be able to effectively teach others how to experience the Git Epiphany is... rather smaller. ;>

Feel free to steal anything you find useful from my site (http://think-like-a-git.net), and I'd be happy to compare notes sometime.

Cheers,
-Sam

Hi Christian, thanks for commenting! Yeah, I thin...

2011-11-18T23:50:44.929+01:00

Hi Christian, thanks for commenting!

Yeah, I think Mercurial retained a much more user-friendly interface from early on. The last two years it seems like Git has caught up a lot on the user-friendliness, while Mercurial has added a lot of features inspired by git.

I had a nice discussion with Martin Geisler (Mercurial committer) at a conference earlier this year, and we pretty much arrived at that you can do anything in Mercurial that you can do with Git (minus some features of the git reflog, I think).

Performance-wise, they're as good as equal.

I ended up focusing on Git because of the SVN-interoperability being better at what I was trying to do at the time. I wouldn't mind switching to Mercurial if the circumstances were different, but now it seems like Git has the lead "out there".

Is Mercurial easier than Git? I'd say yes, because the branching model is a bit easier to grok coming from centralized VCS. Is it simpler than Git? I'd say it's about the same..

And then there is Mercurial, which does the same t...

2011-11-18T18:02:48.931+01:00

And then there is Mercurial, which does the same thing as Git, but apparently is a lot easier, which is why I would never use Git unless forced to. ;-)