This is absurd. It is a tool to aid the development of software. If you can learn a goddamn language, you can spare 20 minutes to figure out the extra couple of steps git can add.
I can tell you it took me a lot longer than 20 minutes to master working with git. Sure, you can tell someone how to clone, branch, commit and push in 20 minutes, but that's not really understanding.
For example, last month I was at a meetup, and had to help someone who was contributing to an open-source project. She had been following the project's instructions on using git, but was stuck. It turned out that she had hit a snag in the middle of a multi-commit patch that was applied with "git am" and as a result, her repository was in an intermediate state and the usual commit, add, reset etc. commands weren't working. I helped her back out to a clean state, but it took me several minutes of scouring documentation to do it, and I consider myself proficient with git. If I hadn't been there, I expect she would have given up on the whole thing, and all because git has some bizarre interactive processes that leave your repository unusable while in progress.
I think it's undeniable that git is unfriendly and obtuse at times, and the people who think otherwise are just examining it too close. They have mastered it, they see all of the justifications for each quirk, and because of that they can't see the big picture, which is that it is extraordinarily difficult for a new programmer to pick it up and be proficient.
So what? A goddamn language is easy compared to git - they all mostly work in the same way.
I don't understand this attitude. Why can't our tools be so easy to use that you don't need to read the instruction manual?
Conceptually, there's nothing that difficult about using git. I have some files that I want to be versioned. Yet, the commands are inconsistent and any non trivial operation requires consultation of a variety of tutorials.
Why do we have to settle for this? Why can't the tool be internally consistent?
