I really don't think that mercurial is very good at hiding the internals. Consider a common operation; asking for the commit history. If you type `hg log` you g

I really don't think that mercurial is very good at hiding the internals. Consider a common operation; asking for the commit history. If you type `hg log` you get something very close to a prettified view of the internal datastructure by default; a list of all commits in the repository, in the order they were added, each annotated with a sequence id that's an index into the internal list. So a new user has to learn: * hg log by default doesn't tell them anything about the current code they're working on; it's just a dump of everything. To get the history of the current working copy they need to pass -f which they are learning in other contexts means "do something unsafe". * hg gives commits sequence ids that can locally be used in place of the commit sha, but must never be shared across repositories. In practice at Mozilla I have seen people run into both these issues, causing much unnecessary confusion.