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Because lots of things flourish despite not being the most beautifully designed piece of technology. Git survives despite its widely-derided UI, email prolifera

by jordigh 11y ago

Because lots of things flourish despite not being the most beautifully designed piece of technology. Git survives despite its widely-derided UI, email proliferates despite spam, and Linux is dominant despite having a less beautiful kernel than BSD. What matters is how useful users think it is. Whether developers think the code is beautiful is less important for adoption.

golergka 11y ago
Yeah, these things are mostly true (apart from git, which I think has the best possible interface for a VCS), but I don't understand why did you suddenly switch from a question about a decision by a particular company to a question of wide adoption of technology by a community. And your second paragraph misses the point: it's not about one of the factors, it's about balance between them. In this particular case, the amount of users who prefer XMPP doesn't seem to be big enough to counter the pain of supporting it.
- IshKebab 11y ago
  > which I think has the best possible interface for a VCS Wow, I can easily imagine much better interfaces. In fact I don't even have to imagine - Mercurial is way nicer.
  - wooptoo 11y ago
    Shame mercurial didn't catch on. I started learning DVCS' with mercurial, back when they were still a new concept, and git wasn't very good (this is an understatement, git was horrible back then). What I really liked was the very friendly and usable command line interface, out of the box shortcuts (which I now emulate in my .gitconfig), clear help pages. It was a bit slower than git for enormous projects but it worked wonderfully for me.
  - xiaomai 11y ago
    Mercurial had a more familiar, but much worse interface than git. More familiar because it was essentially subversions interface made suitable for a dvcs. Worse for lacking (or requiring plugins for) features like the index, commit amending, rebasing, lightweight branches, etc.
    - jordigh 11y ago
      Git didn't have any of those things either except "lightweight branches". It wasn't until 2006 or so that git grew a reasonable commit command. Before then, people relied on tools such as cogito in order to get work done.
      - xolve 11y ago
        Also, Linux kernel uses git! So it has a traction. Once people get used to a tool they stick to it.

by jordigh 11y ago

golergka 11y ago

Yeah, these things are mostly true (apart from git, which I think has the best possible interface for a VCS), but I don't understand why did you suddenly switch from a question about a decision by a particular company to a question of wide adoption of technology by a community. And your second paragraph misses the point: it's not about one of the factors, it's about balance between them. In this particular case, the amount of users who prefer XMPP doesn't seem to be big enough to counter the pain of supporting it.

IshKebab 11y ago
> which I think has the best possible interface for a VCS Wow, I can easily imagine much better interfaces. In fact I don't even have to imagine - Mercurial is way nicer.
- wooptoo 11y ago
  Shame mercurial didn't catch on. I started learning DVCS' with mercurial, back when they were still a new concept, and git wasn't very good (this is an understatement, git was horrible back then). What I really liked was the very friendly and usable command line interface, out of the box shortcuts (which I now emulate in my .gitconfig), clear help pages. It was a bit slower than git for enormous projects but it worked wonderfully for me.
- xiaomai 11y ago
  Mercurial had a more familiar, but much worse interface than git. More familiar because it was essentially subversions interface made suitable for a dvcs. Worse for lacking (or requiring plugins for) features like the index, commit amending, rebasing, lightweight branches, etc.
  - jordigh 11y ago
    Git didn't have any of those things either except "lightweight branches". It wasn't until 2006 or so that git grew a reasonable commit command. Before then, people relied on tools such as cogito in order to get work done.
    - xolve 11y ago
      Also, Linux kernel uses git! So it has a traction. Once people get used to a tool they stick to it.