Why Git is hard

Julia Evans’ StrangeLoop 2023 keynote was about digging into the different reasons a tool can be hard to learn, and it was a real good talk! At the end, as a tossed-off addendum to a conclusion about continuing to learn things, she said “I still don’t know why Git is hard.”

I happen to have thoughts about that one!

I have had to teach a fair number of (generally clever and persistent) people how to get around in Git or how to use its more advanced features. While doing so, I have often failed to get the basics to stick, which is incredibly aggravating to someone who prides themselves on explaining things. Sometimes this devolves into me talking about wave/particle duality as a crucial metaphor for getting through a rebase intact, and everyone in the room looking at me like my second head just tried to convert them to Gnosticism.

So, I’ve spent some time thinking about this before this weekend.

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