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Some thoughts on Git vs complexity


I originally wrote this in the Git For Human Beings mailing list. The thoughts are stolen from Rich Hickey's Simple Made Easy talk. (Matthew McCullough commented the same parallel the same day, but I think his timestamp was a few hours afterwards). I wanted to tweet about it, but it ended up being a whole post, as I'm trying to gather my thoughts on it for my next Git talk.

There's simple stuff, and there's easy stuff.

Simple means the opposite of complex. Easy, on the other hand, means it's very close to the stuff you already know. Git is "simple" but hard. Subversion is "easy", but eventually complex.

Git is *a lot* of features in one tool (think of the 100+ git plumbing commands). Each feature is simple, but learning to use them together is good bit of work. As soon as you've understood the model and you get that Eureka-moment, the tool never fails you, and you find it more and more fun to use the more you learn. (This is why there are so many git enthusiasts, I reckon.)

Subversion has a very limited set of features.It also turns awfully complex when you want to do stuff like merging. Actually the more I learned about Subversion, and the more I used it, the more frustrating I found it.

Why is Subversion complex?

- Because the stuff on the server is something different from what you have locally. Your local checkout is just a thin skin. All the interaction goes over the network with a really thin and crappy API. It’s like reading a book using binoculars. The same information is there, but it’s horrible to get at it.

- Everybody is tangled together using the same repository. People start making mistakes like committing without updating first. Everyone mis-use trunk as their own sandbox. This is complexity too (everything in one bucket).

- It mixes together committing, and pushing the changes to central. A commit should do one thing, and one thing well, and the reasoning should be in the commit message. Some are refactorings, others are feature-changes.

- Because branches are completely disconnected - there’s nothing that ties them together, except being a lot like each other. That’s how merging in Subversion works: “I assume that these two directories will be very similar”, and if they aren’t, BOOM.

Git, on the other hand, is simple: It all boils down to being three kinds of objects in a graph (commits, blobs, trees), and the rest of it are algorithms that work this data-structure.
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Comments

  1. Christian Schlichtherle18/11/11 18:02

    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. ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. tfnico18/11/11 23:50

    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..

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sam Livingston-Gray27/11/11 07:37

    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

    ReplyDelete
  4. tfnico27/11/11 15:17

    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!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Christoph Baudson1/12/11 10:41

    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

    ReplyDelete
  6. tfnico1/12/11 23:08

    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!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Hayes Chan26/2/13 05:27

    The last two decades it seems like Git has captured up a lot on the user-friendliness, while Sudden has included a lot of functions motivated by git.

    ReplyDelete

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