5 ms·

Whatever your opinion on one tool or another might be - it does seem weird that the "market" has been captured by what you are saying is a lesser product. IOW,

Whatever your opinion on one tool or another might be - it does seem weird that the "market" has been captured by what you are saying is a lesser product. IOW, what do you know that nobody else does?

jrochkind1 6mo ago
Welcome to VHS and Betamax. the superior product does not always win the market.
- Per_Bothner 6mo ago
  Not always, but in this case the superior product (i.e. VHS) won. At initial release, Beta could only record an hour of content, while VHS could record 2 hours. Huge difference in functionality. The quality difference was there, but pretty modest.
  - jrochkind1 6mo ago
    I suppose one lesson could be that there are different dimensions of superiority, different products may be superior in different ways. Of course, products also can win market dominance for reasons external to the product's quality itself (marketing, monopoly lock-in, other network effects, consumer preferences on something other than product quality itself, etc).
esafak 6mo ago
That worse is better, and some people don't know better or care.
- dwattttt 6mo ago
  "better" in that sentence is very specific. Worse is also worse, and if you're one of the people for whom the "better" side of a solution doesn't apply, you're left with a mess that people celebrate.
guelo 6mo ago
Network effects and marketing can easily prevent better tools from winning.
- awesome_dude 6mo ago
  I mean, in the fickle world that is TECH, I am struggling to believe that that's what's happened. I personally went from .latest.latest.latest.use.this (naming versions as latest) to tortoise SVN (which I struggled with) to Git (which I also was one of those "walk around with a few memorised commands" people that don't actually know how to use it) to reading the fine manual (well 2.5 chapters of it) to being an evangalist. I've tried Mercurial, and, frankly, it was just as black magic as Git was to me. That's network effects. But my counter is - I've not found Mercurial to be any better, not at all. I have made multiple attempts to use it, but it's just not doing what I want. And that's why I'm asking, is it any better, or not.
  - WolfeReader 6mo ago
    Mercurial has a more consistent CLI, a really good default GUI (TortoiseHg), and the ability to remember what branch a commit was made on. It's a much easier tool to teach to new developers.
    - awesome_dude 6mo ago
      Hmm, that feels a bit subjective - I'm not going to say X is easier than Y when I've just finished saying that I found both tools to have a lot of black magic happening. But what I will point out, for better or worse, people are now looking at LLMs as Git masters, which is effectively making the LLM the UI which is going to have the effect of removing any assumed advantage of whichever is the "superior" UX I do wish to make absolutely clear that I personally am not yet ready to completely delegate VCS work to LLMs - as I have pointed out I have what I like to think of as an advanced understanding of the tools, which affords me the luxury of not having an LLM shoot me in the foot, that is soley reserved as my own doing :)
  - arw0n 6mo ago
forrestthewoods 6mo ago
Worse products win all the time. Inertia is almost impossible to overcome. VHS vs Betamax is a classic. iPod wasn’t the best mp3 player but being a better mp3 player wasn’t enough to claw market share. Google and Meta don’t use Git and GitHub. Sapling and Phabricator much much better (when supported by a massive internal team)
- aaronbrethorst 6mo ago
  What was the better mp3 player than the iPod?
  - codethief 6mo ago
    Anything from iriver.
  - corndoge 6mo ago
    sansa clip+
  - mi_lk 6mo ago
    unironically Zune is goated in its own way
  - CrimsonRain 6mo ago
    anything from Cowon. Always has been
jorams 6mo ago
So far you've only gotten responses to "how can a worse product win?", and they are valid, but honestly the problem here is that Mercurial is not a better product in at least one very important way: branches. You can visit any resource about git and branches will have a prominent role. Git is very good at branches. Mercurial fans will counter by explaining one of the several different branching options it has available and how it is better than the one git has. They may very well be right. It also doesn't matter, because the fact that there's a discussion about what branching method to use really just means Mercurial doesn't solve branches. For close to 20 years the Mercurial website contained a guide that explained only how to have "branches" by having multiple copies of the repository on your system. It looks like the website has now been updated: it doesn't have any explanation about branches at all that I can find. Instead it links to several different external resources that don't focus on branches either. One of them mentions "topic", introduced in 2015. Maybe that's the answer to Git's branching model. I don't care enough to look into it. By 2015 Git had long since won. Mercurial is a cool toolbox of stuff. Some of them are almost certainly better than git. It's not a better product.
- LordDragonfang 6mo ago
  This is so strange, because, at a low level, a branch isn't even a "thing" in git. There is no branch object type in git, it's literally just a pointer to a commit, functionally no different from a tag except for the commands that interact with it.
  - fc417fc802 6mo ago
    Meanwhile mercurial has bookmarks. TBF I'm not sure when it got those but they've been around forever at this point. The purpose is served. I think there are (or perhaps were) some product issues regarding the specifics of various workflows. But at least some of that is simply the inertia of entrenched workflows and where there are actual downsides the (IMO substantial) advantages need to be properly weighed against them. Personally I think it just comes down to the status quo. Git is popular because it's popular, not because it's noticably superior.
dugmartin 6mo ago
JWZ is still blocking traffic from HN so you can't click to read this but you can copy/paste it into a new tab or open it in a incognito window: https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
kasey_junk 6mo ago
GitHub had a business model where public repos were free. BitBucket didn’t. That’s it. That’s why git won, you could put up open source libs with one for free and not the other. Which is extra funny as the centralized service was the most important part of decentralized version control.
- seniorThrowaway 6mo ago
  >the centralized service was the most important part of decentralized version control. I've often thought this about github
- awesome_dude 6mo ago
  Apologies for the late reply - but I just saw this and immediately thought So git /did/ have something better than Mercurial after all, it was a 3rd party, but it still meant that it was massively better than Mercurial.

Whatever your opinion on one tool or another might be - it does seem weird that the "market" has been captured by what you are saying is a lesser product. IOW, what do you know that nobody else does?

jrochkind1 6mo ago

Welcome to VHS and Betamax. the superior product does not always win the market.

Per_Bothner 6mo ago
Not always, but in this case the superior product (i.e. VHS) won. At initial release, Beta could only record an hour of content, while VHS could record 2 hours. Huge difference in functionality. The quality difference was there, but pretty modest.
- jrochkind1 6mo ago
  I suppose one lesson could be that there are different dimensions of superiority, different products may be superior in different ways. Of course, products also can win market dominance for reasons external to the product's quality itself (marketing, monopoly lock-in, other network effects, consumer preferences on something other than product quality itself, etc).

esafak 6mo ago

That worse is better, and some people don't know better or care.

dwattttt 6mo ago
"better" in that sentence is very specific. Worse is also worse, and if you're one of the people for whom the "better" side of a solution doesn't apply, you're left with a mess that people celebrate.

guelo 6mo ago

Network effects and marketing can easily prevent better tools from winning.

awesome_dude 6mo ago
I mean, in the fickle world that is TECH, I am struggling to believe that that's what's happened. I personally went from .latest.latest.latest.use.this (naming versions as latest) to tortoise SVN (which I struggled with) to Git (which I also was one of those "walk around with a few memorised commands" people that don't actually know how to use it) to reading the fine manual (well 2.5 chapters of it) to being an evangalist. I've tried Mercurial, and, frankly, it was just as black magic as Git was to me. That's network effects. But my counter is - I've not found Mercurial to be any better, not at all. I have made multiple attempts to use it, but it's just not doing what I want. And that's why I'm asking, is it any better, or not.
- WolfeReader 6mo ago
  Mercurial has a more consistent CLI, a really good default GUI (TortoiseHg), and the ability to remember what branch a commit was made on. It's a much easier tool to teach to new developers.
  - awesome_dude 6mo ago
    Hmm, that feels a bit subjective - I'm not going to say X is easier than Y when I've just finished saying that I found both tools to have a lot of black magic happening. But what I will point out, for better or worse, people are now looking at LLMs as Git masters, which is effectively making the LLM the UI which is going to have the effect of removing any assumed advantage of whichever is the "superior" UX I do wish to make absolutely clear that I personally am not yet ready to completely delegate VCS work to LLMs - as I have pointed out I have what I like to think of as an advanced understanding of the tools, which affords me the luxury of not having an LLM shoot me in the foot, that is soley reserved as my own doing :)
- arw0n 6mo ago

forrestthewoods 6mo ago

Worse products win all the time. Inertia is almost impossible to overcome. VHS vs Betamax is a classic. iPod wasn’t the best mp3 player but being a better mp3 player wasn’t enough to claw market share. Google and Meta don’t use Git and GitHub. Sapling and Phabricator much much better (when supported by a massive internal team)

aaronbrethorst 6mo ago
What was the better mp3 player than the iPod?
- codethief 6mo ago
  Anything from iriver.
- corndoge 6mo ago
  sansa clip+
- mi_lk 6mo ago
  unironically Zune is goated in its own way
- CrimsonRain 6mo ago
  anything from Cowon. Always has been

jorams 6mo ago

So far you've only gotten responses to "how can a worse product win?", and they are valid, but honestly the problem here is that Mercurial is not a better product in at least one very important way: branches. You can visit any resource about git and branches will have a prominent role. Git is very good at branches. Mercurial fans will counter by explaining one of the several different branching options it has available and how it is better than the one git has. They may very well be right. It also doesn't matter, because the fact that there's a discussion about what branching method to use really just means Mercurial doesn't solve branches. For close to 20 years the Mercurial website contained a guide that explained only how to have "branches" by having multiple copies of the repository on your system. It looks like the website has now been updated: it doesn't have any explanation about branches at all that I can find. Instead it links to several different external resources that don't focus on branches either. One of them mentions "topic", introduced in 2015. Maybe that's the answer to Git's branching model. I don't care enough to look into it. By 2015 Git had long since won. Mercurial is a cool toolbox of stuff. Some of them are almost certainly better than git. It's not a better product.

LordDragonfang 6mo ago
This is so strange, because, at a low level, a branch isn't even a "thing" in git. There is no branch object type in git, it's literally just a pointer to a commit, functionally no different from a tag except for the commands that interact with it.
- fc417fc802 6mo ago
  Meanwhile mercurial has bookmarks. TBF I'm not sure when it got those but they've been around forever at this point. The purpose is served. I think there are (or perhaps were) some product issues regarding the specifics of various workflows. But at least some of that is simply the inertia of entrenched workflows and where there are actual downsides the (IMO substantial) advantages need to be properly weighed against them. Personally I think it just comes down to the status quo. Git is popular because it's popular, not because it's noticably superior.

dugmartin 6mo ago

JWZ is still blocking traffic from HN so you can't click to read this but you can copy/paste it into a new tab or open it in a incognito window: https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

kasey_junk 6mo ago

GitHub had a business model where public repos were free. BitBucket didn’t. That’s it. That’s why git won, you could put up open source libs with one for free and not the other. Which is extra funny as the centralized service was the most important part of decentralized version control.

seniorThrowaway 6mo ago
>the centralized service was the most important part of decentralized version control. I've often thought this about github
awesome_dude 6mo ago
Apologies for the late reply - but I just saw this and immediately thought So git /did/ have something better than Mercurial after all, it was a 3rd party, but it still meant that it was massively better than Mercurial.