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> It's a human problem If it were a human problem, how could alternatives like Mercurial and Darcs get consistent amounts of praise for their intuitive workflo

> It's a human problem If it were a human problem, how could alternatives like Mercurial and Darcs get consistent amounts of praise for their intuitive workflows? > 9 years ago git wasn't the clear winner, it had competition via SVN and Mercurial. Both of them are practically irrelevant at this point so however bad git's UI was, it's clearly better than anything else that existed before. SVN isn't distributed; it mostly tried to replace CVS, which it managed to do very successfully. As for DVCS, the fact that system X became more popular than system Y doesn't mean that every aspect of X is better than Y. Many would say git succeeded despite its awful interface. As far as I can tell, the main feature of git was its speed; that made it usable for huge projects like Linux and Xorg, and this endorsement from high-profile projects gave git the edge for DVCS hosting sites like Gitorious. Then GitHub came along, and grew into such a behemoth that git became the de facto standard. See also: WorseIsBetter

umvi 5y ago
> If it were a human problem, how could alternatives like Mercurial and Darcs get consistent amounts of praise for their intuitive workflows? Because maybe mercurial's real problems wouldn't show up until people started using it at scale. This is a classic problem that happens time and again. Windows vs. Mac back in 2005: "Windows having malware is a human problem" "If it were a human problem, how could alternatives like Mac get consistent amounts of praise for their lack of malware?" Turns out it's just because Mac didn't have a big enough market share. As soon as it did, Apple could no longer claim that Macs can't get malware because they can and do. Similarly, if you scaled up the number of Mercurial users by several orders of magnitude so that it was now "mainstream", I'm sure some of its lesser known pain points and/or counter intuitive behaviors would start floating up to the top 10 HN stories. But since hardly anyone uses Mercurial vs. Git, that doesn't happen. Just because a minority of users praise something (<insert lesser known language>, <insert lesser known DB>, <insert lesser known VCS>, etc.) doesn't mean if you scaled up the userbase one or more magnitudes it would continue getting that level of praise from all users.
- Izkata 5y ago
  > Because maybe mercurial's real problems wouldn't show up until people started using it at scale. I actually tried both git and mercurial almost a decade ago having had only experience with subversion, and found git to be much easier to understand and use. I don't recall what those pain points were, and am sure I couldn't describe them correctly if I did remember, but because of that I do expect such things to start popping up if more people used it.
pseudalopex 5y ago
Mercurial scaled better actually. It's 1 of the reasons Sun, Mozilla, and Facebook used it instead of Git. Typically Git was a bit faster for most operations on Linux. Mercurial was a bit faster for other operations. Especially on Windows. And both were much faster than the rest. Bitbucket and GitHub started around the same time. GitHub just executed better.

umvi 5y ago

> If it were a human problem, how could alternatives like Mercurial and Darcs get consistent amounts of praise for their intuitive workflows? Because maybe mercurial's real problems wouldn't show up until people started using it at scale. This is a classic problem that happens time and again. Windows vs. Mac back in 2005: "Windows having malware is a human problem" "If it were a human problem, how could alternatives like Mac get consistent amounts of praise for their lack of malware?" Turns out it's just because Mac didn't have a big enough market share. As soon as it did, Apple could no longer claim that Macs can't get malware because they can and do. Similarly, if you scaled up the number of Mercurial users by several orders of magnitude so that it was now "mainstream", I'm sure some of its lesser known pain points and/or counter intuitive behaviors would start floating up to the top 10 HN stories. But since hardly anyone uses Mercurial vs. Git, that doesn't happen. Just because a minority of users praise something (<insert lesser known language>, <insert lesser known DB>, <insert lesser known VCS>, etc.) doesn't mean if you scaled up the userbase one or more magnitudes it would continue getting that level of praise from all users.

Izkata 5y ago
> Because maybe mercurial's real problems wouldn't show up until people started using it at scale. I actually tried both git and mercurial almost a decade ago having had only experience with subversion, and found git to be much easier to understand and use. I don't recall what those pain points were, and am sure I couldn't describe them correctly if I did remember, but because of that I do expect such things to start popping up if more people used it.

pseudalopex 5y ago

Mercurial scaled better actually. It's 1 of the reasons Sun, Mozilla, and Facebook used it instead of Git. Typically Git was a bit faster for most operations on Linux. Mercurial was a bit faster for other operations. Especially on Windows. And both were much faster than the rest. Bitbucket and GitHub started around the same time. GitHub just executed better.