Ideological Turing Test Domains

In my view, svn has a number of benefits over git. Let me offer a quick runthrough of why I prefer svn for small projects.

The main reason to use svn in my view is simplicity. git can't do many things svn does with as little friction as svn requires.

Centralized version control is definitely simpler than distributed. Distributed can be useful if you want to develop a feature offline (and find the svn ways of doing that to be a pain, as I do), want to work on something independently for a while, want to work on an experimental branch, etc.. But there's a good reason to prefer centralized in some cases. Distributed version control is too confusing for many people you might want to collaborate with. My research group has enough trouble getting my PhD advisor to use svn. Do you think this will be easier with git?

The documentation for git is pretty bad. In contrast to svn, I can't rely on the documentation for git making sense and basically have to Google for many things, even some things which are straightforward in svn (like svn keywords). The Pro Git website is pretty good, however.

One thing I like is having a incrementing number that refers to a unique version. You actually can get that in git, but it's a complicated command that I've never seen used in real life. This is just how svn works.

Let's say you are using git just want to print the hash and date of last modification in your code or document. svn has a keyword functionality to do this automatically when you update. git makes this at least moderately complicated (for silly reasons). There are several ways to do this, but editing the file directly with a script is unsatisfactory because the file will show up modified, unless there's some git way around this. In svn the files show up as unmodified. You also could pass in the hash at compile time, which is just extra work over svn.

I have heard conflicting things about partial checkouts in git. My impression is that they work but are more complicated than svn. Partial checkouts are totally normal and easy in svn. I do them fairly regularly, as well.

GUIs for git were still underdeveloped last I checked, or at least the free ones were. GUIs make a number of things much easier. At one point I started converting my repositories over to git because I wanted to work offline more often, but the lack of good GUIs made me stick with svn. (I have some other restrictions here that made some GUIs not attractive, and maybe I should look into this again.)

Here are the advantages I see to git/github: pull requests being code reviews and the distributed nature of the software. The former is great, as problems are caught early. The latter is not always an advantage, as I explained earlier, but generally is a major advantage in large projects.

To be honest, I could see myself changing my mind over this in the future, but for now I see no reason to switch from svn to git for most of the repositories I have.

Not sure why you were downvoted. You're definitely onto something. Signaling does seem to be one reason for git's success. Someone I know compared it to The Emperor's New Clothes in the context of how bad git's UI (at least if you were used to svn) and documentation are.

To be honest, I see signaling in a lot of programmer culture. I use Ubuntu, and I had a conversation with my brother about it. He told me while he'd like to have more recent software and the ease of use that comes with Ubuntu, he doesn't want to look like a moron, so he uses Debian. The choice is strictly utilitarian to me, so others' impressions are of no concern. I don't feel the need to signal how hardcore I am in my OS choice. To be honest, switching to Ubuntu has made things so much easier. If you start with Ubuntu server or the netboot installer, you don't need to add Unity or any of the other garbage included by default. I can still do poweruser things if I'd like to (and sometimes I do). The main disadvantage is that I'd like to use a rolling-release distro, but Ubuntu LTS is close enough.

Editor choice also seems to be strongly influenced by signaling. Having tried both vim and emacs and rejecting both*, I'm struck by how condescending many people are about my editor choice. I use Geany at the moment, which is similar to Notepad++. I've had a few conversations that basically went like this:

"If you use any editor other than vim or emacs, you are a moron."

"I don't use vim or emacs. Which other editors have you tried?"

"...none. All others are terrible!"

These people generally have not considered any other editors at all. If they did, they considered Sublime, which is nice, but not open source, and I prefer open source. Many people seem to automatically assume that my editor of choice is garbage, despite the fact that I tried a bunch out at one point and picked the one that fit my needs best. I am yet to talk to anyone with these opinions who considered more than a couple editors when making a choice.

* This was before I heard about org-mode, which might cause me to switch to emacs in the future.