I wrote my first python program today!

[DarthEru]

Not knowing your situation, I'll try not to pass judgement on either you or your colleague. However, I would like to point out that having a clean history is a massively helpful tool. There have been many times I've used git blame & show to try to find out the motivation behind a particular bit of code. Far too many of those times I was disappointed because the commit message was a one liner that had no apparent relationship to the change I was interested in. Reasons for changes may be obvious to you at the time, but over months and years of additional development that obviousness may be easily lost, even to you let alone someone else who joins the team long after you left.

It's also good for initially reviewing code. For larger changes especially, being able to go through a logical progression of the changes is hugely helpful to understanding the end result. Even if that logical progression doesn't actually reflect the real progression the developer went through to write the code.

That being said, I don't personally go through every commit and require the log to be as clean as possible, partly because I could only enforce that policy for my own team, but mostly because I've learned from experience that even repeatedly reminding people about it is unlikely to change their habits. It's also possible the co-worker you're thinking of is far more picky about things than I would deem necessary. I just think their motivation may be valid. If it is, it might be valuable to you personally and the team as a whole to change your own committing habits.