A change of maintainership for Mercurial [LWN.net]

A change of maintainership for Mercurial

Posted Jan 26, 2016 22:53 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: A change of maintainership for Mercurial by Nelson
Parent article: A change of maintainership for Mercurial

> The supposed different mental models is somewhat concerning though, I think I might stay away from developers that make those claims...

Just read Dick Feynmann, about counting time in your head, or about his experiences with Calculus.

Dick got a bit of a reputation for being a whizz with calculus, because when he learnt he was taught an unusual technique. So problems that his fellow students found hard, he found easy. What they didn't realise was that problems they found easy, Dick found hard (because he had a different mental set-up).

Or counting time - some (most?) people have their time-keeping disrupted if they have to hold a conversation at the same time - they count by speaking silently to themselves. But some people hold a conversation no problem, but if you ask them to watch TV while counting, they can't. They keep time by mentally watching a ticker-tape.

Different brains work differently. Some tools just don't work for some people because of that. And it could very easily be muscle memory - what you are exposed to first programs you to expect things to work that way, and relearning it is HARD. WordPerfect was designed to work like a typewriter ...

Cheers,
Wol

A change of maintainership for Mercurial

Posted Jan 27, 2016 16:02 UTC (Wed) by Nelson (subscriber, #21712) [Link] (3 responses)

Not to disagree with you, I do understand that people have different mental models for things. We're not talking about calculus though, we're talking about mechanisms for tracking changes to some files, usually source code and usually sharing them with a team or others. And it's not like you have to know the intricacies of the git file format or the .hg tree to make use of them.

If the mental model is so rigid that someone can't pretty easily adapt to a new tool, I'm of the belief that they'll have a hell of a time solving the problems our customers need solved. Dislike? I get that. You've typed 'hg ...' so long that you tend to automatically type it instead of 'git ...' I kind of understand that and I'd accept that for a while. But claiming to not understand it because of your mental model? I'd not hire you.

A change of maintainership for Mercurial

Posted Jan 30, 2016 4:06 UTC (Sat) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (2 responses)

" And it's not like you have to know the intricacies of the git file format or the .hg tree to make use of them."

Again different brains....
I like git _because_ I got a mental picture of the 'intricacies' of git's data model -- which is quite simple with essentially 3 base components types: commit, tree, blob --
And thanks to that, git command are not magic incantations, I can 'see' what I want to do to the repo and I can match that with commands.

A change of maintainership for Mercurial

Posted Jan 30, 2016 15:52 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Exactly.

Do you use "any tool" because you've been taught "monkey see monkey do", or do you use it because you actually *understand* what's going on under the hood.

My mental model of a word processor matches WordPerfect, so given a problem I can guess the solution. I then try it and it usually works first time. But if I have to do it in Word, I'm lost, and it's a case of monkey see monkey do trial and error.

And it takes a LOT of retraining to get past that hurdle. If it's even possible.

Cheers,
Wol

A change of maintainership for Mercurial

Posted Feb 1, 2016 2:20 UTC (Mon) by Nelson (subscriber, #21712) [Link]

That's great but ultimately the repo structure isn't what matters, it's what is stored in it.

Maybe I should have said it different, I'd avoid any developer that had trouble using any revision control system.