First of all, the history re-writing of both git and mercurial do not throw any history away[1], let's be clear on that. The history re-writing allows you to c

First of all, the history re-writing of both git and mercurial do not throw any history away[1], let's be clear on that. The history re-writing allows you to commit willy-nilly as often as you want, and then allows you to clean up those commits to make them readable, useful, and presentable to your team by combining commits, reordering commits, deleting commits, etc. The freedom to commit (and have an undo-point to go back to) at any time is very liberating and anxiety reducing :-) Using VCS's other than git and mercurial people still end up doing essentially the same thing, they are simply required to do all the cleanup outside of the VCS before they commit. Almost nobody commits every sloppy, intermediate, untested edit of their files to svn or perforce. Users of those VCS's "rewrite" and "throw away" history just the same. Footnote: 1. They both keep the original commits around after they are replaced by "rewritten" or "edited" commits. git does eventually delete the old history with its garbage collection, but it takes a number of weeks for that to happen. Mercurial saves backup bundle files (or obsolete changesets if using the evlove plugin) indefinitely. You have to manually delete them.