Github and git's user base

Posted Jul 10, 2012 7:16 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Github and git's user base by pr1268
Parent article: GitHub finally raises funding (GigaOm)

It's just shows that professional tools and customer's tools follow different paths. Git is professional tool, it's not directed to Joe Average. Thus it was enough to create robust core and pretty pictures were added by other people later (a lot of git users don't need and don't use them at all). In user-facing world hype is everything and real capabilities are of lesser consequence.

This phenomenon is observed not just in software. Think video recorders. The professional ones try to boost the thing that matters (optical resolution, cross-talk reduction, etc). Size of the matrix is the deciding factor. The customer-oriented ones talk about megapixels (which can only be used to produce megabytes of noise when they are not supported by appropriate optical resolution), image "enhancers" (which actually destroy the quality - and often can not even be disabled), etc. Recent trend is to portray mobiles are adequate replacement for the video recorder. Sure, mobile wins on one important point: availability. When you need it mobile is always there and video recorder is almost never there. But everything else... there are no comparison. Yet hype machine is in full swing and tries to sell phones as a replacement not for customer cam, but for professional one! Sure, these adverts will never convince a professional to buy the phone as a replacement for professional video recorder - but Joe Average looks on the cheap "tool of a professional" and reaches for his wallet! Will we see something similar WRT VCS where people will try to bill wiki as replacement for a proper VCS? Who knows...

Video /camera/

Posted Jul 10, 2012 10:06 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

In case anybody else is as confused as I was, khim seems to mean a video /camera/ not a recorder (video recorder was the widespread term for a video cassette recorder, and a less widespread term for several logical successors in that niche including DVD recorders and PVRs)

There isn't an equivalent phenomenon in version control in my opinion, or rather there is, but it was with us from the outset. The clueless will copy a few files to another directory, or zip everything up once a week and count this as "version control" and feel glad they didn't have to learn those over-complicated tools they see discussed on sites like StackOverflow.