Science and technology

Happy 14th anniversary: What do you’re keen on about Git?

In the 14 years since Linus Torvalds developed Git, its affect on software program growth practices could be exhausting to match—in StackOverflow’s 2018 developer survey, 87% of respondents stated they use Git for model management. Clearly, no different device is anyplace near knocking Git off its throne because the king of supply management administration (SCM).

In honor of Git’s 14th anniversary on April 7, I requested some lovers what they love most about it. Here’s what they informed me.

(Some responses have been frivolously edited for grammar and readability)

“I can’t stand Git. Incomprehensible terminology, distributed so that truth does not exist, requires add-ons like Gerrit to make it 50% as usable as a nice centralized repository like Subversion or Perforce. But in the spirit of answering ‘what do you like about Git?’: Git makes arbitrarily abstruse source tree manipulations possible and usually makes it easy to undo them when it takes 20 tries to get them right.” —Sweet Tea Dorminy

“I like that Git doesn’t enforce any particular workflow and development teams are free to collaborate in a way that works for them, be it with pull requests or emailed diffs or push permission for all.” —Andy Price

“I’ve been using Git since 2006 or 2007. What I love about Git is that it works well both for small projects that may never leave my computer and for large, collaborative, distributed projects. Git provides you all the tools to rollback from (almost) every bad commit you make, and as such has significantly reduced my stress when it comes to software management.” —Jonathan S. Katz

“I respect Git’s precept of “plumbing” vs. “porcelain” commands. Users can successfully share any form of info utilizing Git with no need to understand how the internals work. That stated, the curious have entry to instructions that peel again the layers, revealing the content-addressable filesystem that powers many code-sharing communities.” —Matthew Broberg

“I love Git because I can do almost anything to explore, develop, build, test, and commit application codes in my own Git repo. It always motivates me to participate in open source projects.” —Daniel Oh

“Git is the first version control tool I used, and it went from being scary to friendly over the years. I love how it empowers you to feel confident about code you are changing while it gives you the assurance that your master branch is safe (obviously unless you force-push half-baked code to the production/master branch). Its ability to reverse changes by checking out older commits is great too.” —Kedar Vijay Kulkarni

“I love Git because it made several other SCM software obsolete. No one uses VS, Subversion can be used with git-svn (if needed at all), BitKeeper is remembered only by elders, it’s similar with Monotone. Sure, there is Mercurial, but for me it was kind of ‘still a work in progress’ when I used it while upstreaming Firefox support for AArch64 (a few years ago). Someone may even mention Perforce, SourceSafe, or some other ‘enterprise’ solutions, but they are not popular in the FOSS world.” —Marcin Juszkiewicz

“I really like the simplicity of the inner mannequin of SHA1ed (commit → tree → blob) objects. And porcelain instructions. And that I used it as patching mechanism for JBoss/Red Hat Fuse. And that this mechanism works. And how Git may be defined within the great tale of three trees.” —Grzegorz Grzybek

“I just like the generated Git man pages which make me humble in entrance of Git. (This is a web page that generates Git-sounding however in actuality utterly nonsense pages—which regularly offers the identical feeling as actual Git pages…)” —Marko Myllynen

“Git changed my life as a developer going from a world where SCM was a problem to a world where it is a solution.” —Joel Takvorian


Now that we have heard from these 10 Git lovers, it is your flip: What do you respect about Git? Please share your opinions within the feedback.

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