In this thread - tons of smart people thinking that the tools we use to replace “make a backup of a file on a server somewhere” should require entire reference books, as if that’s normal.
Saying “it’s a graph of commits” makes no sense to a layperson. Hell the word “diff” makes no sense. Requiring training to get something right is acceptable, but “using CVS” is a tiny tiny part of the job, not the whole job. I mean, even most of the commenters on this thread are getting small things wrong (and some are handwaving it away saying “oh that small detail doesn’t matter”).
Look, git is hard. It’s learnable, but it’s hard. The concepts are medium hard to understand, and the way it does things is unique and designed for distributed, asynchronous work - which are usually hard problems to solve.
Saying “it’s a graph of commits” makes no sense to a layperson.
Sure, but git is aimed at programmers. Who should have learned graph theory in university. It was past of the very first course I had as an undergraduate many years ago.
Git is definitely hard though for almost all the reasons in the article, perhaps other reasons too. But not understanding what a DAG is shouldn’t be one of them, for the intended target audience.
While I agree 100% with your main point,
"it’s a graph of commits” makes no sense to a layperson
You’re probably putting your standards too low. Every coder should know what a graph is, the basic concept at least. If you can understand fizzbuzz you can understand graphs too.
the word “diff” makes no sense
diff is short for difference. And that basically explains it
