4 ms·

Your useful guide aside: why not have him use mercurial? git has a very steep learning curve and an interface only a mother could love. Mercurial on the other

Your useful guide aside: why not have him use mercurial? git has a very steep learning curve and an interface only a mother could love. Mercurial on the other hand has a clean interface very similar to svn, and has all the advantages of git that you list above. And can be straightforwardly run over apache to boot. Also the command is one letter shorter than git.

garyrob 12y ago
First, I know git, and not mercurial. Second, I don't think there is a steep learning curve for the subset included in my post. Third, I think git has enough momentum that it makes sense for beginning programmers to focus on it. I suspect Mercurial will get a lower and lower percentage of the market place over time, because programmers will generally need to learn git at some point, and once they've done so, there is less reason for them to go against the tide on their next project by learning Mercurial. (An "increasing returns" situation.) Maybe I'm wrong about this -- it's just the sense I have. But, see this chart, which I think tends to validate it: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=git%2C%20svn%2C%20hg&cmpt=q http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=git%2C%20svn%2C%20hg&...
- chdir 12y ago
  Both are great, but for a beginner, I too feel that Mercurial is much easier to get started. You don't have to spend any time 'understanding' how it works, just 3-4 commands is all that it takes to use it. > Mercurial will get a lower and lower percentage of the market place over time Lots of big projects continue to use Hg, some even switching to it from Git (e.g. FB) https://hg.python.org/ https://hg.python.org/ https://hg.mozilla.org/ https://hg.mozilla.org/ https://code.facebook.com/posts/218678814984400/scaling-mercurial-at-facebook/ https://code.facebook.com/posts/218678814984400/scaling-merc...
stormbrew 12y ago
For purely local use I really don't think there's actually a substantial difference between mercurial and git in terms of interface, mother's love or not. When you start talking about running it over apache you've gone into a whole other use case (and suddenly you have apache as well...). I also think this is a relatively old complaint. Git's interface has improved a lot in the 1.8-2.1 window of versions, and now gives pretty decent guidance on some of the hairier parts of itself even.
- kasey_junk 12y ago
  For the most part you are right. But the mercurial command line interface is phenomenally better and the basics of vcs work with much less cognitive overhead than git.

garyrob 12y ago

First, I know git, and not mercurial. Second, I don't think there is a steep learning curve for the subset included in my post. Third, I think git has enough momentum that it makes sense for beginning programmers to focus on it. I suspect Mercurial will get a lower and lower percentage of the market place over time, because programmers will generally need to learn git at some point, and once they've done so, there is less reason for them to go against the tide on their next project by learning Mercurial. (An "increasing returns" situation.) Maybe I'm wrong about this -- it's just the sense I have. But, see this chart, which I think tends to validate it: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=git%2C%20svn%2C%20hg&cmpt=q http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=git%2C%20svn%2C%20hg&...

chdir 12y ago
Both are great, but for a beginner, I too feel that Mercurial is much easier to get started. You don't have to spend any time 'understanding' how it works, just 3-4 commands is all that it takes to use it. > Mercurial will get a lower and lower percentage of the market place over time Lots of big projects continue to use Hg, some even switching to it from Git (e.g. FB) https://hg.python.org/ https://hg.python.org/ https://hg.mozilla.org/ https://hg.mozilla.org/ https://code.facebook.com/posts/218678814984400/scaling-mercurial-at-facebook/ https://code.facebook.com/posts/218678814984400/scaling-merc...

stormbrew 12y ago

For purely local use I really don't think there's actually a substantial difference between mercurial and git in terms of interface, mother's love or not. When you start talking about running it over apache you've gone into a whole other use case (and suddenly you have apache as well...). I also think this is a relatively old complaint. Git's interface has improved a lot in the 1.8-2.1 window of versions, and now gives pretty decent guidance on some of the hairier parts of itself even.

kasey_junk 12y ago
For the most part you are right. But the mercurial command line interface is phenomenally better and the basics of vcs work with much less cognitive overhead than git.