| Git's evolution was interesting to observe at the time. Back in around 2005, the company I worked for was using Subversion, but then I demoed Darcs to my colleagues (which I had been using at my previous company), and everyone immediately loved it, so we quickly migrated over. Around 2006, we hired a new developer who was what you might call an early adopter. He wanted to use Nginx back when all the documentation was in Russian — and he also wanted us to use Git. But the benefits of Git were not obvious at the time to someone using Darcs. In fact, Git was positively stone-age at the time — terrible CLI UI, inscrutable commands, steep learning curve for no obvious benefit. And so we resisted the change for several years. But it was apparent even back then that the writing was on the wall. After all, it came from Linus Torvalds. People were adopting Git en masse, and not much was happening with Darcs. And then, in 2008, GitHub came along, and that was that. Darcs was amazing to use [1], but it quickly joined the graveyard of technically-superior-at-the-time projects that were too good to succeed: The Amiga, Plan 9, Borland Delphi. Darcs was ahead of its time in its approach to change management, and I think that we'll eventually have get something like it again. It's probably not going to be sufficient to merely make a better mousetrap, so Pijul isn't it (with all due respect to the technology, which looks nice). Whatever replaces Git will have some kind of synergy that just means everyone will want to move, similar to what Slack did with chat. Then again, we still use email nearly 50 years later, so it might take a while. [1] But not perfect. Ultimately its dreaded "exponential-time conflict" bug contributed a lot to its lack of success, I think. It was trivial to get your repository into a state which messed it up permanently. And the bug had no real fix until years later. |