That said, it's definitely true that Linux has strong and negative opinions on C++.
Git had the advantage that it could learn from Monotone's mistakes, and focus on speed, and not have to experiment as much since much of the basic design ideas were already there. Git also made several better architectural choices, I believe, going with a much more simple and stable repository format than Monotone had.
I've always taken the opinion that OO makes sense where one needs the ability to model abstract systems in a way that can express and even explain them through the code. Modeling an computer doesn't require or benefit as much from such abstractions.
"C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do nothing but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C."
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/57643...
All the ideas were already there. Somebody just wanted his damn DVCS to be written in C :-)
Git didn't exist yet at that point.
Who can blame him?
Certainly nobody can criticize the decision these days and keep a straight face. Results speak louder than ideaology.
I use git and I love that it's faster than Mercurial (a couple of years ago, I timed 'git log' at 1 second and 'hg log' at 13 seconds on same repo contents).
But precisely because it's written in hard-to-modify, hard-to-library-ize C code with several Linux dependencies (afaik), many companies are choosing Mercurial (Google, Kiln, Atalassian).
I can easily imagine a future where Mercurial has far more plugins/extensions than git (because it's easier to write Mercurial plugins) which will be a huge advantage in Mercurial's favour (a la Firefox). For such reasons, it's likely I will switch to hg one of these days.
It may only be a matter of time before Mercurial catches up with git's performance and becomes the de-facto standard, and git is relegated to the Linux kernel and other early adopters.
Other than the index all my git knowledge directly translated to Mercurial. I myself am planning to switch as soon as I can overcome inertia and go through one of the tutorial.