User interface and usability

[Teemu Likonen]

Adrian Wilkins wrote (2008-09-10 15:20 +0100):

> Competing with git on raw performance is daft. The design of git was
> optimized to be good at merging a very large number of kernel patches,
> because that's what Linus does. Other considerations in it's design
> were secondary, and it shows.

You are making too strong connection between the internal design and the 
user interface. The git development started with the internals and 
without much UI considerations, this is true, but it's not like 
everything depends on the basic design and the code that was written 
first. Those things don't "show" anymore. What "shows" today are the UI 
decisions made by other people, people who came after Linus Torvalds.

If you don't like git's UI it's because you don't like it. You simply 
disagree with git's UI decisions and find other tools better. This is 
perfectly valid opinion, of course. No need to go to these old "git is 
optimized for Linus's personal workflow" arguments.

Anyway, it's nice that there's a tool that you like and that helps you 
get your work done.

As a side note, there's a git users' survey going on:

    http://www.survs.com/survey?id=M3PIVU72&channel=2WXE4BVTW8

Among other things there is a question related to the user interface. 
It's evaluated in terms of easy to learn:

    5) Did you find Git easy to learn?

    Very easy                            6%        131
    Easy                                23%        499
    Reasonably                          52%       1111
    Hard                                17%        365
    Very hard                            2%         43

    Total respondents                             2149
    Respondents who skipped this question          239

This shows pretty much Gaussian distribution centered around 
"reasonably" and slightly biased towards "easy" side. The complete 
statistics and graphs are available here:

    http://www.survs.com/WO/WebObjects/Survs.woa/wa/shareResults?survey=M3PIVU72&rndm=OKJQ45LAG8