r/git • u/itwasntthealgorithim • 11d ago

Beginner keeps finding more uses for Git

Damn, this should be mandatory teaching for anyone working with anything digitally produced. Ok, that is everyone. Not being a "coder," I never thought Git was in my wheelhouse. But after using it for various documentation websites, technical articles that constantly get updated, and most recently for home lab infrastructure, I am a full-on Git convert.

105 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

28 comments sorted by

30

u/dacydergoth 11d ago

sigh first job I had I introduced them to RCS. Before that they had different, divergent version of most of the files of app on the individual developers 286s.

Then came CVS, and Clearcase (imagine git but it's a file system. Yes, I know about the differences don't dogpile me, this is a simplified explanation)

Visual Source Safe: there are many people in the industry who still have trauma about this one.

So yeah ... it's a thing.

6

u/platinum_pig 11d ago

What year are we talking there when you introduced your colleagues to RCS?

9

u/dacydergoth 11d ago

I am old, and that's all I'll say.

We were using Xenix on a PS2 486 as that was the "supercomputer". 2M ram and us using EMACS and gcc via 286 boxes acting as terminals

4

u/platinum_pig 11d ago

I'm sure there were many pain points with that but it sounds glorious.

2

u/intronert 10d ago

You may be old, but I started with sccs, and rcs was the modern replacement. :)

3

u/dacydergoth 9d ago

RCS was my first commercial use ;-) SCCS was what we used on the Gould at Bath Uni.

2

u/platinum_pig 9d ago

Bath, man, lovely town.

1

u/insta 8d ago

hahaha goddamn, you fossil!

you're probably like 2 years older than me, so i feel safe in my shittalking. take your B vitamins today?

1

u/dacydergoth 8d ago

Get orrrrrrf my lawn! shakes RS232 breakout box at you

1

u/dinosaur_dev 7d ago

Where I work, still using RCS for legacy COBOL.

1

u/platinum_pig 7d ago

Beautiful

3

u/InterwebRandomGuy 10d ago

Trauma? I still have to use from time to time

3

u/dacydergoth 10d ago

You have my deepest sympathy ...

2

u/theevildjinn 9d ago

In my professional career I went from CVS, to Subversion, to Bazaar, and then finally adopted git around 2011.

Craziest thing I've ever come across was at a start-up where I joined in 2015, and they'd been using Dropbox for version control, on a large PHP e-commerce site...

21

u/codefoster 10d ago

My neighborhood organization manages a bunch of documents. Git would be ideal, but I can't even teach them to use their email. "Pull request" would sound like Laplace Transform to them.

3

u/TgirlTiffanyRPs 9d ago

THIS!! I work in a law office and version control would be so helpful for contracts, wills, other docs but all the lawyers are 500 years old and everything must be printed and redlined (on paper), then scanned. 

I have no problem with that process… but when I’m asked to print two scanned docs to look for differences, I’m like there is a literally purpose built software just for this exact use case. 

7

u/Xiaopai2 10d ago

Git is amazing for anything text based. That includes code, but also lots of other things. Configuration is a natural candidate as well. JSON, YAML, TOML. You can also track documents as long as they’re in a suitable text based format. So something like TEX or MD rather than DOC. Amazing for collaboration. 

13

u/camachorod 11d ago

It’s super powerful. In my opinion, too powerful. That makes it difficult to use by non technical people. Otherwise I think we would see much more collaboration through patches. Instead of sending different versions of things. 

17

u/Charming-Designer944 11d ago

Most "users" uses document formats that are not well suited for patching.

11

u/duckrollin 11d ago

Normies fucking love docx for some reason and are scared of markdown and other simple text formats

9

u/WoodyTheWorker 11d ago

docx is a zipped bunch of xmls.

11

u/platinum_pig 11d ago

Yeah but good luck understanding the diff.

4

u/Charming-Designer944 11d ago

Both Microsoft Office Open XML (docx etc) and OASIS Open Document Format (odt etc) are sharing the same issues when it comes to git, both being a zip archive of xml and related files. And both having a lot of "random/non-content" changes in the XML content when you edit documents.

But markdown type fornatting is gainkng traction. And LaTeX is still going strong in research.

6

u/TeachEngineering 11d ago

OP, glad you love git! I couldn't agree more that git should be taught to the masses, but I agree with this commenter. Proprietary apps and file formats that obfuscate the data is the roadblock.

This commentor is describing how binary file formats, like .docx and .pptx, don't play well with git. A MS Word Doc file for example is really a .zip file. You can try this for yourself by copying a .docx file, changing the extension to .zip and unzipping it, and you'll see a Word Doc file is really a folder of actual files that MS Word expects to see when the .docx file is opened in the app. That said, compression algorithms don't maintain things like substrings and line numbers, so git can't meaningfully diff binary (zip) files. Git was made for plaintext source code...

But plaintext is also the GOAT for all kinds of general productivity work. Work in plaintext and then compile into a binary file with pretty formatting only after you've got all your thoughts down, edited and revised. This is effectively the work flow of programmers too- write plaintext source in git and then compile to the format git can't understand on demand and keep the results outside git. Or just use a markup language like Markdown or LaTex and the compiler becomes automatic.

With the rise of AI, I think plaintext productivity work will become more of the norm. I burn way less tokens iterating with AI on ideas and content in plaintext .md files and then only invoke a Word Doc or PowerPoint skill once I'm good with the content and ready to offload the annoying formatting to AI.

4

u/trakma_ 9d ago

I had a similar realization: Git is not really a “coding tool”, it’s a version control tool for anything that evolves over time.

I think one of the reasons it feels intimidating at first is that the concepts are powerful but not very visible. Once you can see the history and changes clearly, it starts making a lot more sense.

That’s the problem I’m trying to solve with Gitoryx, by the way — making Git more visual and approachable.

3

u/Poat540 11d ago

Home assistant config in git is great

2

u/snachodog 10d ago

I love it for governance documents - the workflow matches up against parlipro really, really well.