“Jujutsu (jj) is a version control system with a significantly simplified mental model and command-line interface compared to Git, without sacrificing expressibility or power (in fact, you could argue Jujutsu is more powerful). Stacked-diff workflows, seamless rebases, and ephemeral revisions are all natural with jj […]”
Part 2 of the series is out and is here.
It is no secret that git’s interface is a bit too complex - even XKCD has made fun of it.
But what is amusing is that people now have a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, and plain refuse to believe there could be something better.
(Perhaps motivated by the long list of half-assed helper interfaces and GUIs which just were hapless trying to hide the sprawling complexity).
Telling people they have Stockholm syndrome is not a good way to convince them to change their behavior. Present the pros, be honest about the cons and let people make their own decisions. The jj workflow isn’t for everyone, and sometimes people’s git workflows are simple enough that there isn’t a benefit to learning a new tool. I like jj because I have to deal with complicated workflows for work and jj makes them much easier. At a different job it was much simpler and I wouldn’t have paid too much attention to jj.
Yeah that’s probably not the best way to express it. Perhaps it is more like:
Git is huge and complex to learn, and some people have spent a lot of time to learn it - hundreds of hours.
Now, eyeing jujutsu, they expect that for doing this complex task with jujutsu they will again have to learn a very complex interface, with a lot of effort, and they decide it probably ain’t worth it. Which by the way, for software is a reasonable heuristic most of the time.
So if somebody tells them that jujutsu is less effort to learn to do complex tasks, they don’t believe it and that’s it.
It also seems to happen frequently that people try jujutsu, but it does not click for them, they try commands but they do not get what’s the advantage - perhaps because it is too different from git. And later they try again and it clicks. Steve Klabnik described that for himself.
Moreover some people don’t need to do complex tasks.
And people in general hate it when interfaces change in unwanted ways. Which is human nature too and a valid way to allocate time and attention, which both are a scarce resource.