Someone makes a project trying to make something easier to learn (so, trying to make the world a better place), and you call it "extremely pointless", you tell them they "don't understand Git", they're "brain-damaged", "erroneous", they should "take the time to understand their tools", because the tools are "not complicated" and "incredibly simple".
Besides your arrogant "I'm right, you're stupid and wrong, and there's no questioning me" attitude, why would you take such a hostile tone towards anyone's work, ever? How could you think that's okay or constructive?
I'm hugely sympathetic to the opinion that Git is needlessly difficult to learn and needless easy to make mistakes in due to huge flaws in the CLI. I'd present that case, but, hey, it's presented a hundred times here and everywhere else. It's clear there's no point arguing that point to you, though, because I'd be stupid and wrong just for disagreeing with you. So instead I'm trying to convey that your arrogance is unacceptable in the community in the hopes that it will not reappear.
>Someone makes a project trying to make something easier to learn (so, trying to make the world a better place)
Again, spare me the hyperbolic the "trying to make the world a better place." The principle behind my post, as given in my very first statement is that they basically failed. They are gearing people towards failure. It would have been better to just create a thin layer on top of git with slightly renamed or alias commands -- all while having "release valves" that guide you into the true, underlying community crafted toolset underneath that git has been using for years (and for very good reason). Any errors you're likely to come across while using git have been documented either by the team or in various posts around the internet. It's easy to search for these errors. If your target audience are developers who have a hard time with Git, why would you make it needlessly hard to research errors that are likely to happen (given how new this tooling is). For example: labeling rebasing as "fusing" is basically telling them: "haha, good luck googling what just went wrong!". Good luck hopping on an IRC or Slack channel and getting someone to help you. A decade of community problem solving and documentation just went out the window because the Gitless team decided to play musical semantics with commands.
>why would you take such a hostile tone towards anyone's work, ever?
Leave your ego at the door. We're talking about a toolset.
>Besides your arrogant "I'm right, you're stupid and wrong, and there's no questioning me" attitude
Please do not respond to any of my posts in this thread anymore, especially if that is the basis of this comment chain. That is a ridiculous sentiment and I'm not going to devote any effort into addressing it.
>I'm hugely sympathetic to the opinion that Git is needlessly difficult to learn and needless easy to make mistakes
I would strongly disagree about the "needlessly difficult" part, but I would also claim that the "easy to make mistakes" is demonstrably false with Git. Git makes it extremely difficult again to do something you should not be doing in the first place and then the community over the years has placed plenty of warnings when you do those questionable actions anyways; on top of giving you the ability to revert the mistake and bring your repository to a sane place with one simple command. Checking out branches with conflicting changes is just one of the simpler safety checks and roadblock that Git provides where Gitless decided to just go "Nah, you can actually do that." with seemingly no apology as to why you would ever want to allow such a thing -- other than just for the sake of convenience, but I would label it as laziness as it makes it incredibly easy to pollute your repository at that point. It doesn't even provide any kind of warning mechanism or cleanup tool for this handy "feature."
>So instead I'm trying to convey that your arrogance is unacceptable in the community in the hopes that it will not reappear.
The only thing worse than calling me arrogant is your complete, unconstructive obliviousness towards your own attitude. Not only have you still failed to say anything worthwhile or present any kind of counter to my opinion, but you're being a complete dick about it and trying to label me in a negative light for no reason. Which ends up really at the end of the day making you a troll at worst and a hypocrite at best.
I am not talking about a toolset. I'm talking about how I believe you have a "I'm right, you're stupid and wrong" attitude. So I'm not disputing your opinion about Gitless, I'm criticizing how you presented it. I don't think the sentiment is ridiculous, because I think it's correct; clearly if you write it off as ridiculous then we're just talking past each other. Similarly, I don't think I am labeling you in a negative light for "no reason": the reason is that you are acting in a way that I think deserves to be called out negatively, so as to hopefully dissuade you from acting that way.
I do happen to think Gitless is a noble effort that will not change the world or be adopted by much of anyone, as with many interesting projects that are posted here, but I still think you should be non-hostile towards it, and sympathetic instead of dismissive towards the problem it is trying to solve (since clearly there are heaps of people who feel the same way, as evidenced by these and many other comment threads).
> I'm not going to respond to you anymore past this
Feedback from the outside: ajkjk strikes me as someone making reasonable points and who is capable of productive discussion. You are coming across as unnecessarily arrogant and prickly, and thus someone with whom it's best to avoid discussion.
Maybe you are an extremely fluent but non-native speaker of English and your idioms aren't coming across as you want? Or maybe you just prefer a more "aggressive" approach than we are comfortable with?
In any case, independent of the technical merit of your arguments, you might reconsider ajkjk's criticism, as I think there are many others (like me) who agree with it.
You consider his first post to be productive? You must be dreaming.
> ajkjk strikes me as someone making reasonable points
He is not making any point, so it's weird that you would say that. He hypocritically stated I was coming off as arrogant. Fair game, even though I really don't see how it remotely comes off that way, but you can't exempt yourself from your own criticism in a post that does not constructively further the conversation in any way.
> You are coming across as unnecessarily arrogant and prickly, and thus someone with whom it's best to avoid discussion.
Apparently so, but I don't see it. I gave my opinion, and that was it.
>you might reconsider ajkjk's criticism
I most definitely will not, as this is a technical discussion. I'm not going to muddle the waters. Nothing I said was needlessly "arrogant" (at what point was puffing myself up?) -- and if it was prickly then I'd question why it was chosen to focus on that aspect of it instead of directly countering what was stated.
When discussing technical matters: leave your ego at the door. At every turn I gave him a chance to actually discuss something and he refused to do so. The fact that you decided to continue this non-sense is mind-boggling to me. What's the point?
I most definitely will not, as this is a technical discussion.
For better or worse, like most discussions, it also has social aspects. Consideration of these aspects may help you better convey your technical points.
What's the point?
Based on your comment history, you have technical knowledge that others could benefit from, but aren't very successful in getting your point across without being downvoted or flagged. If you continue with your current approach, at some point your account will likely be banned. Whether they are exactly accurate or not, I think contemplating ajkjk's criticisms may help provide you insight that will allow you to have better interactions with HN.
The fact that you decided to continue this non-sense is mind-boggling to me.
I am generally a very technical person, I use git frequently and only by the command line interface, I think I mostly understand the underlying operations, and yet I frequently am baffled by the commands required to get from where I am to where I want to be. While I likely can overcome this through study and repetition, I think git would be a more useful tool for others in the future if the user facing command line interface was improved.
Viewed over the longer term (and I say this as someone who approached git through RCS, CVS, and SVN and likes the improvements Git offers) the current interface is not perfect, is not set in stone, and improvements are a good thing. Assumptions that the 'gitless' authors are only doing this because they do not properly understand the internals of git are likely incorrect. While I don't think 'gitless' quite has the right solution, I think attempts to better align git's command line interface with the underlying operations are commendable, not pointless, and decidedly not nonsense.
>Consideration of these aspects may help you better convey your technical points.
And yet despite him blatantly confronting me in an aggressive personal manner, you've ignored his original post and decided to focus on my post, all in spite of my attempts to keep the conversation on topic. Most likely because you agree with him. It really removes any credence from his post and other posts echoing him about my original post being "prickly" when you're a complete dick to someone directly. Talk about arrogance.
I can't call a technical concept brain damaged, but aggressively labeling people in a confrontational manner is a-okay. Got it.
>and yet I frequently am baffled by the commands required to get from where I am to where I want to be.
Have an example? Most of the examples I've seen come from a fundamental misunderstanding about what git is doing. Git is rarely in the wrong.
There's a lot of internal plumbing commands that are completely backwards (or just have not been updated to align with the rest of the toolset) but an extremely small majority of people will ever even know about them, let alone have to use them. Especially if you're just starting out with git.
>think attempts to better align git's command line interface with the underlying operations are commendable
Except as presented in the examples I've given, it's doing the exact opposite of this. It's going against the very basic foundation of git. Git is an acyclic graph with each node representing a change delta from its "parent." The very fact that branches suddenly keep track of which specific changesets (tracked or not!) belong to them is completely counter to how the very core of git works.
Besides your arrogant "I'm right, you're stupid and wrong, and there's no questioning me" attitude, why would you take such a hostile tone towards anyone's work, ever? How could you think that's okay or constructive?
I'm hugely sympathetic to the opinion that Git is needlessly difficult to learn and needless easy to make mistakes in due to huge flaws in the CLI. I'd present that case, but, hey, it's presented a hundred times here and everywhere else. It's clear there's no point arguing that point to you, though, because I'd be stupid and wrong just for disagreeing with you. So instead I'm trying to convey that your arrogance is unacceptable in the community in the hopes that it will not reappear.