[lobster_johnson]

My company was using Darcs at the time when git (mid-2008) was gaining popularity. Github wasn't around yet. At the time, git felt like a big step backwards technologically. It had a terrible UI, and the whole thing felt like something put together with tape and paperclips. Meanwhile, Darcs was (and still is) pure magic.

At the time, the choice of git wasn't that obvious. There were several popular, quite attractive contenders, including Mercurial, Monotone, Bazaar and GNU arch (and its forks), and it wasn't obvious who would win. But then Github arrived and changed everything, and it felt like everyone was suddenly caught up in a historic momentum whether they liked it or not.

We've had lots of those historic moments, some of them more slow-moving than others. Mac and NeXT being outmaneouvered by Windows; Lisp, Dylan and Smalltalk being relegated to the dustbin through the rise of more popular, worse languages; and so on. Not all of these developments are terrible (I love that Nginx prevailed over Apache and that Rails took over from Java app servers), but it's ridiculous how often the paperclip solutions win over the more thoughtful ones.