I used CVS and ClearCase before moving into Git, and it took me some time to adjust to the fact that the cost of branching in Git is much much less than ClearCase. And getting into the “distributed” mindset didn’t happen overnight.
I initially found git a bit confusing because I was familiar with mercurial first, where a “branch” is basically an attribute of a commit and every commit exists on exactly one branch. It got easier when I eventually realized that git branches are just homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space.
git branches are just homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space
Yeah, once you realize that everything falls into place.
I initially found git a bit confusing because I was familiar with mercurial first, where a “branch” is basically an attribute of a commit and every commit exists on exactly one branch.
To be fair, Mercurial has some poor design choices which leads to a very different mental model of how things are expected to operate in Git. For starters, basic features such as stashing local changes were an afterthought that you had to install a plugin to serve as a stopgap solution.
