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Every single time we are discussing git this comment shows up. But why is one popular when the other one is so much better? I guess we will never know

by zibzab 5y ago

disgruntledphd2 5y ago
GitHub is the reason. Turns out giving beer to developers globally is an effective way to get a technology adopted.
- zabzonk 5y ago
  Bitbucket used to provide free (and pretty good) Mercurial hosting.
  - oblio 5y ago
    Bitbucket had a much crappier UI.
    - zabzonk 5y ago
      Actually, one of the reasons I preferred hg to git is that Windows explorer GUI integration back then was far superior to gits, which was buggy as hell.
      - ivanbakel 5y ago
        This doesn't seem relevant to the comment you're replying to. Bitbucket's web UI sucks, which is why it didn't have the effect on Mercurial that Github had on git. Having used Bitbucket and GitHub, I think GH is much nicer - both in the sense of basic stuff like page loads being faster, and in terms of features. And since it's the main tool that everyone on the development team spends their time on for communication & collaboration, those things really matter.
        mixmastamyk 5y ago
        Also, remember to compare the sites ten years ago rather than today.
zabzonk 5y ago
The Torvalds effect.
- zibzab 5y ago
  I know you imply, but this could also be interpreted as "battle proven" or how about "guaranteed to still work in 30 years"
_ph_ 5y ago
There are several reasons. In the beginning, hg was critisized to be slow as it was written completely in python. The effect of the Linux team going with Git instead created a lot of attention to git, probably also a lot in people who were faszinated by the capabilities of git and did not care much about user friendlyness. The biggest push for git undoubtedly came from github. That is now the premier platform for hosting software, especially open source software.
ryandrake 5y ago
Although it sounds like a silly reason, compare the names themselves. I don’t even know how to pronounce “mercurial” without looking it up. The word doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue like git does. And then the command itself is “hg”. WTF is up with that? I mean, ha-ha we all get the joke, but was the program made for chemists? Unnecessarily clever. Don’t underestimate the extent to which a difficult/confusing name/brand can harm adoption.
- zabzonk 5y ago
  > I don’t even know how to pronounce “mercurial” But you do know how to pronounce "Unnecessarily"?
- j605 5y ago
  I think for most people, they would encounter it in a science class early in life (at least for English speakers). And Hg is just the chemical symbol for mercury, https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/element/Mercury#section=Identifiers https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/element/Mercury#section=Ide...
- Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
  For non-native speakers it's much more obvious how to pronounce mercurial than git. Mercurial can only be pronounced like mercury, I guess, is there any other sensible choice? But in git, it's not obvious if the g is pronounced as in get or as in gin until you look it up.
lanstin 5y ago
This also shows that quality of the technology matters. Like the discussion on the business value of Amazon's "use APIs always," using git is using a superior source code technology, designed from the ground up for distributed development by a master of distributed development; good things are enabled automatically. Linus' naming and UX choices and inconsistencies aside, the tool is awesome. That's why it wins in distributed development environments - the bazaar not the cathedral and not the bespoke engineering team hidden away in the corporation.
marcosdumay 5y ago
That is solely because of network effects. Anyone of them could be the popular one, as could any of the weirder ones like darcs, even it having technical flaws (mostly fixed by now).
pjmlp 5y ago
Git and Linux go hand-in-hand, so there is your killer use case right there.

Every single time we are discussing git this comment shows up. But why is one popular when the other one is so much better? I guess we will never know

by zibzab 5y ago

Every single time we are discussing git this comment shows up. But why is one popular when the other one is so much better? I guess we will never know

disgruntledphd2 5y ago

GitHub is the reason. Turns out giving beer to developers globally is an effective way to get a technology adopted.

zabzonk 5y ago
Bitbucket used to provide free (and pretty good) Mercurial hosting.
- oblio 5y ago
  Bitbucket had a much crappier UI.
  - zabzonk 5y ago
    Actually, one of the reasons I preferred hg to git is that Windows explorer GUI integration back then was far superior to gits, which was buggy as hell.
    - ivanbakel 5y ago
      This doesn't seem relevant to the comment you're replying to. Bitbucket's web UI sucks, which is why it didn't have the effect on Mercurial that Github had on git. Having used Bitbucket and GitHub, I think GH is much nicer - both in the sense of basic stuff like page loads being faster, and in terms of features. And since it's the main tool that everyone on the development team spends their time on for communication & collaboration, those things really matter.
      - mixmastamyk 5y ago
        Also, remember to compare the sites ten years ago rather than today.

zabzonk 5y ago

The Torvalds effect.

zibzab 5y ago
I know you imply, but this could also be interpreted as "battle proven" or how about "guaranteed to still work in 30 years"

_ph_ 5y ago

There are several reasons. In the beginning, hg was critisized to be slow as it was written completely in python. The effect of the Linux team going with Git instead created a lot of attention to git, probably also a lot in people who were faszinated by the capabilities of git and did not care much about user friendlyness. The biggest push for git undoubtedly came from github. That is now the premier platform for hosting software, especially open source software.

ryandrake 5y ago

Although it sounds like a silly reason, compare the names themselves. I don’t even know how to pronounce “mercurial” without looking it up. The word doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue like git does. And then the command itself is “hg”. WTF is up with that? I mean, ha-ha we all get the joke, but was the program made for chemists? Unnecessarily clever. Don’t underestimate the extent to which a difficult/confusing name/brand can harm adoption.

zabzonk 5y ago
> I don’t even know how to pronounce “mercurial” But you do know how to pronounce "Unnecessarily"?
j605 5y ago
I think for most people, they would encounter it in a science class early in life (at least for English speakers). And Hg is just the chemical symbol for mercury, https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/element/Mercury#section=Identifiers https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/element/Mercury#section=Ide...
Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
For non-native speakers it's much more obvious how to pronounce mercurial than git. Mercurial can only be pronounced like mercury, I guess, is there any other sensible choice? But in git, it's not obvious if the g is pronounced as in get or as in gin until you look it up.

lanstin 5y ago

This also shows that quality of the technology matters. Like the discussion on the business value of Amazon's "use APIs always," using git is using a superior source code technology, designed from the ground up for distributed development by a master of distributed development; good things are enabled automatically. Linus' naming and UX choices and inconsistencies aside, the tool is awesome. That's why it wins in distributed development environments - the bazaar not the cathedral and not the bespoke engineering team hidden away in the corporation.

marcosdumay 5y ago

That is solely because of network effects. Anyone of them could be the popular one, as could any of the weirder ones like darcs, even it having technical flaws (mostly fixed by now).

pjmlp 5y ago

Git and Linux go hand-in-hand, so there is your killer use case right there.