alt Hacker News1. Ease of use. Other VCS have more consistent command line interfaces; Git's interface has to be studied. In practice, people end up using GUIs with missing functionality and then end up searching for help, and a lot of real experts come to rely on powerful wrappers like Magit, LazyGit, or JJ.
(Compare to Mercurial, Fossil or Git; those systems have consistent and usable interfaces. There's much less demand for wrappers or LLM tooling since they're easy to use already.)
2. Preservation of history. Two common commands - git rebate and git push -f - cause commit history to be lost, sometimes permanently. ("Just be careful" and "Just don't use those commands" are useful pieces of advice for an individual, and virtually impossible to enforce over groups.)
3. Conflict resolution. Git forces the user to resolve conflicts ASAP so we often lose information about A. What the conflict exactly was, and B. How the individual resolved it. Most VCS have this issue; JJ allows you to commit the conflict and solve it in a separate commit, which is nice.
1. Usually people have no mental model about versioning other than “draft-1, draft-final, final, final2, final-final,…’. Because they don’t care about requirements and design decisions documentation, auditing changes, and release management. Git provides a set of tools for solving those. Wrappers are for when you have your own workflow for those needs and have a good understanding of git.
2. https://git-scm.com/docs/git-reflog
It’s very hard to loose data in git.
3. The goal of writing code is to have working software. Conflict messages are like compiler warnings, better have them than getting errors slipping by unnoticed. If A conflict with B, the root cause is often a design conflict, which means that the design of the software is inconsistent.
The conflict only matters as long as it’s not been solved. For each commit, the design of the software need to be consistent, and the succession of commit describe the evolution of the design. A is not lost, B is not lost in the case of a merge and may stay for a long time when rebasing. C which solves the difference between A and B (and may replace B) is also consistent. I don’t care about inconsistency.