4 ms·
Git is popular because when GitHub was in full startup mode (and not the current $350 million in cash, sit-on-their-hands mode), they ran bar meetups and gave e
by seiji 11y ago
Git is popular because when GitHub was in full startup mode (and not the current $350 million in cash, sit-on-their-hands mode), they ran bar meetups and gave every ruby novice in the world free alcohol to join their platform.
Turns out free booze times tens of thousands of initial users beats the better interface of hg being advertised on impersonal mailing lists.
At this point, (experienced) people have just gotten used to all the weird edge cases and overly complex ways of doing things with git, so changing back to a simpler way is now more complicated.
- herge 11y agoThe linux project was using git before github even existed, and would probably still use it even if the rest of the world had chosen, say, bazaar instead.
- seiji 11y agoYes, but that's not what made git popular. What revision control did Linux use before git? It sure wasn't popular with the public even though Linux used it. What made git popular was thousands of slightly clueless novice Ruby users forced on to git by GitHub. They then began writing thousands of blog posts about how git is confusing, but—they, in their infinite cleverness—discovered the secrets and will now share them with you.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 11y agohahah I almost forgot bazaar.
- kelvin0 11y agoHey, I still use bazaar and aside from some minor quirks it has been quite robust over the years.
- antod 11y agoYep, it was Github rather than git. Rails being hosted on Github early on was a big factor too. The rest of the Ruby community followed. Then came about 3/4s of the Python community (some big holdouts still on hg though), then the fast growing Javascript community etc. The network effect of Github collaboration snowballed it in a way a standalone source control tool couldn't. In those early Github days the Rails community had the most effective evangelism and hipster clout. The "modern git" vs "crufty svn" narrative back then closely paralleled the "modern Ruby/Rails" vs "crufty Java" narrative too. The Linux kernel community was never going to drive widespread git adoption by itself - the average coder would never do any kernel coding. At the time, the core Linux devs only cared about making a tool for themselves, and they still don't like the way Github works.