7 ms·

I have a lot of respect for both Linus Torvalds and Junio Hamano. I think git has been very important, Linux even moreso. But why didn’t darcs or hg win instead

• djur 4y ago
  The answer for why Git beat Mercurial in overall usage more or less boils down to GitHub being very successful. That isn't to say that Git wasn't already in a good position prior to that, but GitHub made it very easy to get into Git in a way that hadn't really existed before. (Anyone who used CVS or SVN on SourceForge knows what I mean.) At that point, it's just network effect. GitHub made using Git easy enough that people were willing to accept a clunky interface. It's not like people expected great interfaces from CLI programming tools in 2008, anyway. People are still using Mercurial, in any case. As for Darcs, I used it. It's cool. I'm not convinced it's that much easier to understand than Git, and it has well-known performance issues.
  • MichaelCollins 4y ago
    Git was already very hype before github arrived. Every LUG and CS club was having people evangelize git seemingly every week before there was even a whisper of github. I think it got this hype from the association with Linus and Linux.
  • still_grokking 4y ago
    I would turn it around: GitHub became a success because Git was so popular.
    • agumonkey 4y ago
      I think so. Mercurial had a lot of people using it, lots of features .. yet something made git blossom way higher very rapidly. Maybe python perf made a difference ..