5 ms·

Git was built with a very specific use case and aimed at an extraordinarily technical subset of users. It dominated the world despite the UX flaws, which sugge

Git was built with a very specific use case and aimed at an extraordinarily technical subset of users. It dominated the world despite the UX flaws, which suggests they really aren't that bad.

hardware2win 4y ago
I'd say that ppl got used to it and it is good enough + industry standard, so it is hard to migrate to something else Especially if you'd have to lose github, thats the real force If gh migrated to something else, then a lot of ppl would follow
- elsjaako 4y ago
  These days when I have to use svn somewhere I use git as a client, because it works better for me. If you prefer you can use mercurial as a git client in the same way. Most of my git use stays local on my PC, uploading it to github or gitlab or whatever is a secondary concern for me.
kasey_junk 4y ago
It dominated the world because GitHub was better than BitBucket and had more generous free levels. If only that wasn’t the case we’d all be using a sensible source control system now instead of one where people repeatedly say things like “if you just learn the underlying model…”
- samwillis 4y ago
  > GitHub was better than BitBucket and had more generous free levels GitHub for many years only had free public repos, not privet, BitBuckets USP was that you could have privet repositories for free. GitHub "won" because of the social aspect around it and the tooling for open source projects - it never had more generous free levels.
  - kasey_junk 4y ago
    BitBucket limited the number of repos you could have while GitHub allowed you to have as many as you wanted so long as they were public. Which had the (intended?) effect of making it more useful socially.
- carapace 4y ago
  It's not even an anecdote but, uh, I prefered hg to git until the day I tried to use it on a system with the wrong Python installed... (I like Python! But it's a scripting language, not a systems language. Also the "deployment story" is bananas.)
elsjaako 4y ago
I for one like how git works. Some of the command names are weird, but I know more sane names are being introduced (e.g. git restore, git switch). Yes, you need to follow a tutorial to use it effectively. Designing for beginning users is often detrementantal to advanced users, and I object to that being called "user friendly". I'm not very vocal about git usually because I'm not an expert I have no big complaints, and I'm not that interested in arguing about it. I think there's a lot of us that are perfectly happy with git; we just make less noise.
rkangel 4y ago
I'd argue the opposite - that the model was so good and so much better than anything else that it was adopted despite the UI/UX flaws. Things can be good, have a flaw and still be considered good. That doesn't mean that we pretend the flaw doesn't exist.
- GuB-42 4y ago
  Mercurial is built on what is almost the same model and has what I think is a better UI/UX. Some people say that git is technically superior but you really need to be an advanced user for it to matter, or work on a really large project. At work, we switched from SVN to Mercurial, and from Mercurial to Git. Most people were happy to switch away from SVN, but few enjoyed the change from Mercurial to Git. Personally, it took me much longer to get used to Git than with Mercurial, even though Mercurial was my first DVCS. I now have a slight preference for git, but I am happy with either (just don't bring back SVN!). Why Git came to dominate and not Mercurial? I am not sure, but I don't think technical reasons explain everything. Its association with Linux probably helped a lot.
  - rkangel 4y ago
    I was also a Mercurial fan who had to reluctantly accept the rise of Git. Git was always a bit quicker, but Mercurial was much more predictable until you really understood the ins and outs of Git. > Why Git came to dominate and not Mercurial? The answer is actually really simple and non-technical: Github. We take these feature rich online code hosting platforms for granted now, but Github was really the leading edge of the wave. It made it easy for people to work together on writing software so it had great takeup and started a Git snowball effect.
  - frutiger 4y ago
    > Why Git came to dominate and not Mercurial? I was an early proponent of Mercurial over git. While they are similar, a few “minor” things made a big difference: Mercurial distinguished between branches and heads, whereas git did not. This added extra complexity. Git embraced checksums as identifiers while Mercurial provided local revision numbers, this obscured the mental model. Git is faster to pronounce than either “Mercurial” (which has a tricky vowel in there) or “hg”.
toshk 4y ago
They are bad. Some concepts like rebase etc. I still don't understand. In software we often go for further complexity instead of less. I think because most of us who are the lead developers are often the most intelligent. And we often enjoy these complicated abstract models and they come easy to us. However in satisfying our own intellectual vanity we often don't see how many we leave behind. Which is good for our hourly rates, but less good for creating affordable and simple software. Anyway one of the main practical advantages git had was decentralized repos meaning you were not dependent on an external server which meant git was often much faster if working with in daily tasks compared to centralized versioning systems
- BossingAround 4y ago
  I'm sorry if this sounds arrogant, but if you don't understand basic Git concepts like rebase, I don't think you're in a position to comment on the architecture of Git
  - toshk 4y ago
    Thats kinda the point :). I've read this many times, but schopenhauer in german is more readable: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/804115/when-do-you-use-git-rebase-instead-of-git-merge https://stackoverflow.com/questions/804115/when-do-you-use-g...
lawn 4y ago
> It dominated the world despite the UX flaws, which suggests they really aren't that bad. No it doesn't. It suggests the other features are so damn good that it overcame the horrible UX.
ReptileMan 4y ago
So was mercurial ... but it much more user friendly.
pjmlp 4y ago
It dominated the world thanks to Linus cult (their hero can do no wrong), and being required for Linux contributions. I bet git produced by a no name Linus, in isolation not required by any major project, would have hardly been taken any major uptake.
- Jedd 4y ago
  > It dominated the world thanks to Linus cult (their hero can do no wrong), and being required for Linux contributions. I think parent's point is that that demographic is positively tiny, and there were plenty of other serviceable offerings around at the time. The claim stands - git won despite its UX flaws, which does suggest the alternatives, while serviceable, weren't sufficiently fit for purpose.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    The alternatives weren't required for collaboration in Linux development.
    - Jedd 4y ago
      Yes, but again, the number of people collaborating on Linux kernel development is truly tiny. I think perhaps you're over-estimating the network effect for VCS's -- having multiple version control binaries on your machine is low cost, and aliases can, up to a point, give you a consistent interface to them all. The highly sophisticated demographic of kernel developers would not have been at the pub insisting that their friends drop svn and use git (exclusively!), anymore than they would have been trying to get any other projects they worked on to adopt bitkeeper previously. The fact that bitkeeper was required for 'collaboration in Linux development' for so long supports this position.
      - pjmlp 4y ago
        Bitkeep wasn't free beer and its adoption was widely controversial, until Git was born given their change of heart.
koonsolo 4y ago
I've worked with CVS, Subversion, Bazaar, Visual SourceSave, Team Foundation Version Control, Mercurial and Git. The worst systems are the Microsoft ones, but the one with the most complex interface is definitely Git. I would argue it won because of github. I'm using Git because of that, but still prefer Mercurial in every way.
- memorable 4y ago
  I agree with this. Mercurial is cool, but if you need to convert your Mercurial project to Git to push to GitHub, then it's a fucking pain.
  - wrycoder 4y ago
    There is Sourcehut, which supports Hg.

Git was built with a very specific use case and aimed at an extraordinarily technical subset of users. It dominated the world despite the UX flaws, which suggests they really aren't that bad.

hardware2win 4y ago

I'd say that ppl got used to it and it is good enough + industry standard, so it is hard to migrate to something else Especially if you'd have to lose github, thats the real force If gh migrated to something else, then a lot of ppl would follow

elsjaako 4y ago
These days when I have to use svn somewhere I use git as a client, because it works better for me. If you prefer you can use mercurial as a git client in the same way. Most of my git use stays local on my PC, uploading it to github or gitlab or whatever is a secondary concern for me.

kasey_junk 4y ago

It dominated the world because GitHub was better than BitBucket and had more generous free levels. If only that wasn’t the case we’d all be using a sensible source control system now instead of one where people repeatedly say things like “if you just learn the underlying model…”

samwillis 4y ago
> GitHub was better than BitBucket and had more generous free levels GitHub for many years only had free public repos, not privet, BitBuckets USP was that you could have privet repositories for free. GitHub "won" because of the social aspect around it and the tooling for open source projects - it never had more generous free levels.
- kasey_junk 4y ago
  BitBucket limited the number of repos you could have while GitHub allowed you to have as many as you wanted so long as they were public. Which had the (intended?) effect of making it more useful socially.
carapace 4y ago
It's not even an anecdote but, uh, I prefered hg to git until the day I tried to use it on a system with the wrong Python installed... (I like Python! But it's a scripting language, not a systems language. Also the "deployment story" is bananas.)

elsjaako 4y ago

I for one like how git works. Some of the command names are weird, but I know more sane names are being introduced (e.g. git restore, git switch). Yes, you need to follow a tutorial to use it effectively. Designing for beginning users is often detrementantal to advanced users, and I object to that being called "user friendly". I'm not very vocal about git usually because I'm not an expert I have no big complaints, and I'm not that interested in arguing about it. I think there's a lot of us that are perfectly happy with git; we just make less noise.

rkangel 4y ago

I'd argue the opposite - that the model was so good and so much better than anything else that it was adopted despite the UI/UX flaws. Things can be good, have a flaw and still be considered good. That doesn't mean that we pretend the flaw doesn't exist.

GuB-42 4y ago
Mercurial is built on what is almost the same model and has what I think is a better UI/UX. Some people say that git is technically superior but you really need to be an advanced user for it to matter, or work on a really large project. At work, we switched from SVN to Mercurial, and from Mercurial to Git. Most people were happy to switch away from SVN, but few enjoyed the change from Mercurial to Git. Personally, it took me much longer to get used to Git than with Mercurial, even though Mercurial was my first DVCS. I now have a slight preference for git, but I am happy with either (just don't bring back SVN!). Why Git came to dominate and not Mercurial? I am not sure, but I don't think technical reasons explain everything. Its association with Linux probably helped a lot.
- rkangel 4y ago
  I was also a Mercurial fan who had to reluctantly accept the rise of Git. Git was always a bit quicker, but Mercurial was much more predictable until you really understood the ins and outs of Git. > Why Git came to dominate and not Mercurial? The answer is actually really simple and non-technical: Github. We take these feature rich online code hosting platforms for granted now, but Github was really the leading edge of the wave. It made it easy for people to work together on writing software so it had great takeup and started a Git snowball effect.
- frutiger 4y ago
  > Why Git came to dominate and not Mercurial? I was an early proponent of Mercurial over git. While they are similar, a few “minor” things made a big difference: Mercurial distinguished between branches and heads, whereas git did not. This added extra complexity. Git embraced checksums as identifiers while Mercurial provided local revision numbers, this obscured the mental model. Git is faster to pronounce than either “Mercurial” (which has a tricky vowel in there) or “hg”.

toshk 4y ago

They are bad. Some concepts like rebase etc. I still don't understand. In software we often go for further complexity instead of less. I think because most of us who are the lead developers are often the most intelligent. And we often enjoy these complicated abstract models and they come easy to us. However in satisfying our own intellectual vanity we often don't see how many we leave behind. Which is good for our hourly rates, but less good for creating affordable and simple software. Anyway one of the main practical advantages git had was decentralized repos meaning you were not dependent on an external server which meant git was often much faster if working with in daily tasks compared to centralized versioning systems

BossingAround 4y ago
I'm sorry if this sounds arrogant, but if you don't understand basic Git concepts like rebase, I don't think you're in a position to comment on the architecture of Git
- toshk 4y ago
  Thats kinda the point :). I've read this many times, but schopenhauer in german is more readable: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/804115/when-do-you-use-git-rebase-instead-of-git-merge https://stackoverflow.com/questions/804115/when-do-you-use-g...

lawn 4y ago

> It dominated the world despite the UX flaws, which suggests they really aren't that bad. No it doesn't. It suggests the other features are so damn good that it overcame the horrible UX.

ReptileMan 4y ago

So was mercurial ... but it much more user friendly.

pjmlp 4y ago

It dominated the world thanks to Linus cult (their hero can do no wrong), and being required for Linux contributions. I bet git produced by a no name Linus, in isolation not required by any major project, would have hardly been taken any major uptake.

Jedd 4y ago
> It dominated the world thanks to Linus cult (their hero can do no wrong), and being required for Linux contributions. I think parent's point is that that demographic is positively tiny, and there were plenty of other serviceable offerings around at the time. The claim stands - git won despite its UX flaws, which does suggest the alternatives, while serviceable, weren't sufficiently fit for purpose.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  The alternatives weren't required for collaboration in Linux development.
  - Jedd 4y ago
    Yes, but again, the number of people collaborating on Linux kernel development is truly tiny. I think perhaps you're over-estimating the network effect for VCS's -- having multiple version control binaries on your machine is low cost, and aliases can, up to a point, give you a consistent interface to them all. The highly sophisticated demographic of kernel developers would not have been at the pub insisting that their friends drop svn and use git (exclusively!), anymore than they would have been trying to get any other projects they worked on to adopt bitkeeper previously. The fact that bitkeeper was required for 'collaboration in Linux development' for so long supports this position.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Bitkeep wasn't free beer and its adoption was widely controversial, until Git was born given their change of heart.

koonsolo 4y ago

I've worked with CVS, Subversion, Bazaar, Visual SourceSave, Team Foundation Version Control, Mercurial and Git. The worst systems are the Microsoft ones, but the one with the most complex interface is definitely Git. I would argue it won because of github. I'm using Git because of that, but still prefer Mercurial in every way.

memorable 4y ago
I agree with this. Mercurial is cool, but if you need to convert your Mercurial project to Git to push to GitHub, then it's a fucking pain.
- wrycoder 4y ago
  There is Sourcehut, which supports Hg.