[tanzam75]

It's because Git has won, in terms of usershare.

Bitbucket, the Mercurial hosting service, now also offers Git. Xen, the first major project to use Mercurial, just switched to Git last month. Microsoft has added Git to Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server.

Whatever Joel's personal source-control preferences were, he has to sell into a world where there are more Git users than Mercurial users.

It's unfortunate, as I preferred Mercurial, but then, Git also comes with some advantages to mitigate the disadvantages. They really were closely-matched. Which is why it was a religious war -- it boiled down to preferences.