I see a future in jj

> There are no substantial technical or usability reasons to switch to JJ from Git [...]. This is a neutral impersonal opinion that is virtually a fact.

I respect your opinion, but I don't think it's a fact and I couldn't disagree any further with it. I wrote a whole testimonial about why I love jj (first one there): https://jj-vcs.github.io/jj/latest/testimonials/#what-the-us...

> it's impractical for most working programmers to switch

I don't know what you mean here. I think it's quite practical to switch to jj, and people switch over all the time. Some people are going to be earlier adopters than others, but the early adopters can bring others along (as I've been lucky to do at Oxide).

> focus on something whose main appeal is more than social

Steve and I both think that Jujutsu's appeal is far more than merely some bandwagon effect. I do think that social appeal is an important part of making a project succeed, and that projects without substantial technical merit win due to social appeal all the time, but Jujutsu has both! It's amazing!

> There are no substantial technical or usability reasons to switch to JJ from Git and it's impractical for most working programmers to switch. This is a neutral impersonal opinion that is virtually a fact.

Not a thing in here is true, especially not objectively true. As neutral as you may believe yourself, it might be a good time to step back and reexamine your priors that led you to state so confidently that there’s no usability reason to switch in particular.

> There are no substantial technical or usability reasons to switch to JJ from Git

sounds like someone hasn't used jujutsu

> There are no substantial technical or usability reasons to switch to JJ from Git and it's impractical for most working programmers to switch.

Not in my experience. jj is easy to pick up and a joy to use. I like git. I deeply appreciate git. But git can feel like snow shoveling sometimes, while in jj things just click into place.

jj is freeing, because things that were a hassle before are now easy, and other things that were impossible are also easy.

I know there's a lot of hype around for a lot of things, and I get grumpy from all of it. Jujutsu is one of the few things that actually deserve the praise being heaped on them.

You may disagree, of course. But I hope that some day, you'll have reason to be happy about this tool, instead of feeling... whatever touched you off like this.

> it might be a good time to step back and reexamine your priors that led you to state so confidently that there’s no usability reason to switch in particular.

The key word I used is "substantial." The usability improvements over Git are marginal and if they ever become non-marginal, they can relatively easily be added to git. This is what my comment is getting at. The only essential difference between Git and JJ is that they are different fiefdoms. There is no substantial technological difference. It's just two different social factions with marginally different opinions about how to type CLI commands.

This comment could have been written when people were pushing to SVN repos on SourceForge when Git was becoming the next big thing, enough for a competitor to founded.

Yet still, the status quo is not Subversion and SourceForge, both of which have been relegated to antiquity, but git and GitHub.

Will something else unseat git and GitHub in the coming years? And will it be Jujutsu or some other innovation on version control?

Who knows, but I see no need to be so dismissive of somebody’s passion in such an arrogant way.

> There are no substantial technical or usability reasons to switch to JJ from Git

Every magit user disagrees with you.

> and it's impractical for most working programmers to switch

This very much sounds like someone who has never even tried jj. Tell us: What makes switching impractical?

> My well-intentioned recommendation to Steve, because I've been there, is: If you want to avoid feeling like you've wasted your life in a few years on code that doesn't live up to its promise and is essentially no different than the code that already exists in Git (and Hg, Pijul, Fossil, etc.),

Is Steve even a developer for jj?

I have not contributed to jj directly basically at all yet: https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/commits?author=steveklabnik

I am assuming that this new job will change that.

> I respect your opinion

Thank you for charitably responding to the substance of my comment and especially not whatever tone you may have perceived. I appreciate you.

I was thinking, it'll probably catch on like Omarchy did, except it's written in Rust, so... little chance of it being milkshake-ducked.

But as we say on Hackernews, there are two kinds of people with respect to jj: those who love it, and those who haven't tried it.

Doing the same thing, but with better usability, is immensely valuable. Remember, Hackernews thought Dropbox was "just" ssh+rsync, but they made a billion dollars making that easy.

Changesets, the op log, first class conflicts, no staging area.

JJ might produce commits that can be stored in Git, but the affordances are different. If Git wants to adopt them, it becomes no longer Git.

On the other hand, I'm happily using JJ while everyone I collaborate with is using Git. JJ doesn't need to "win" to be useful, it just needs to be useful enough that the people who maintain it continue to maintain it.

I’ve tried it. I don’t love it or hate it. It’s more of a “meh”. I can see how it’d be nice if I was disciplined about my commit history, but I tend to be fine with chunky, clunky git. I don’t spend as much time curating perfect commit history as jj fans seem to.

Perhaps take a look at jj and give it a go. Maybe you’ll like it.

I know I did. The fact I can use it with git and it doesn’t interfere with any GitHub PR workflows means no-one needs to know I use it. I enjoy the jj model. Maybe you could too, and it’s not a crazy investment of time and energy. It’s an evening playing around with a code kata or something.

Then working with vcs becomes that little bit more enjoyable.

Found linus' alt

These are my thoughts exactly. Focus on building the best thing instead of telling everyone about the dreams you want to reach. Speak softly and carry a big stick as it were.