Monkey see, monkey do would be watching someone use git and imitating them. Reading the manual or an overview of the commands and using them is how learning new tools typically works.
It should be possible to learn the commands for creating a branch, uploading our changes or making a commit like it was/is possible for all version control tools and then move on with our professional lives, which likely revolve around writing software and not fumbling with git.
By the way, I love your conversation about Merkle trees below; it was one of the most surreal things I've read lately. :-)
> It should be possible to learn the commands for creating a branch, uploading our changes or making a commit like it was/is possible for all version control tools
The problem revolves around the fact that, despite same name being used, git!branch != svn!branch, git!commit != svn!commit, etc. They serve related purposes - but not the same, because the concepts behind them are different. Learning a tool means learning those concepts. So in the process of learning "git commit" and "git branch", you're supposed to pick up on the "pointer to a node in a DAG" thing - otherwise you haven't learned "git commit", you've learned something else that's vaguely similar. And then you'll have difficulties when its behavior goes against your expectations.
But they behave pretty darn close to SVN branches and commits and... they're also called branches and commits. It's clear why that happened - no one would have used a weird tool which turned the old concepts on their heads, so git was being taught based on comparisons with existing tools.
Now that git's very popular, the teachers have become arrogant and are claiming that our mental models for how VCS work are wrong and we should instead adapt our thinking to the git internals. In almost all other professions a confusing tool is scorned, but only developers are expected to learn how all sorts of weird contraptions work and then anyone who can't keep up is scorned instead.
git is almost 15 years old and here we have yet another attempt at clarifying how it works to the masses. Why are there so many git GUIs and tutorials and attempts to clarify how this tool works? It's a freaking VCS, not rocket science. git took something that used to be straightforward and doable by any developer and turned it into an over-complicated mess.
Now here's a question for you: why do you defend this anti-developer tool instead of siding with fellow developers?
It should be possible to learn the commands for creating a branch, uploading our changes or making a commit like it was/is possible for all version control tools and then move on with our professional lives, which likely revolve around writing software and not fumbling with git.
By the way, I love your conversation about Merkle trees below; it was one of the most surreal things I've read lately. :-)