Why it became popular? It's like power tools for my code. Until a better way comes along, we still mostly develop software with code in a bunch of files. And

Why it became popular? It's like power tools for my code. Until a better way comes along, we still mostly develop software with code in a bunch of files. And we still mostly depend on the shitty filesystem for all that. That's what Git does. Frees me to some extent from the shitty filesystem. Personally I think Git is always useful but I reap far, far more dividends on big projects where the forking, branching and merging give me support for software engineering as the social craft that it is.