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> There’s this whole creation myth of how Git came to be that kind of paints Linus as some prophet reading from golden tablets written by the CS gods themselves. What? > Git isn’t just plain wonderful, and in my view, it’s not inevitable either. I mean, the proof is in the pudding. So why did we end up with Git? Was it just dumb luck? Maybe. But I was there at the start for both Git and Mercurial (as I comment elsewhere in this post). I used them both equally at first, and as a Python aficionado should've gravitated to Mercurial. But I like to understand how tools work, and I personally found Mercurial harder to understand, slower to use, and much less flexible. It was great for certain workflows, but if those workflows didn't match what you wanted to do, it was rigid (I can't really expound on this; it's been more than a decade). Surprisingly (as I was coding almost entirely in Python at the time), I also found it harder to contribute to than Git. Now, I'm just one random guy, but here we are, with the not plain wonderful stupid (but extremely fast) directory content manager. |
It's a relief to hear someone else say something like this, it's so rare to find anything but praise for mercurial in threads like these.
It was similar for me: In the early/mid 2010s I tried both git and mercurial after having only subversion experience, and found something with how mercurial handled branches extremely confusing (don't remember what, it's been so long). On the other hand, I found git very intuitive and have never had issues with it.