Hacker News Reader

Comment by mmmeff | Hacker News Reader

I started using Mercurial in college and then switched to git at my first job. I haven't seen Mercurial since. I still don't understand how Git won in the long run, it's CLI is so much worse than `hg`. My guess would be that Bitbucket added `git` support before Github added `hg` support.

View on HN

Git made some design decisions that sacrifice usability for speed when you're dealing with a gigantic repository on the scale of the Linux kernel, which is what it was designed for.

I believe that git won out over mercurial for the same reason that small start ups choose systems and processes that are the same as those used by big players like Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.

People should try to make design decisions and choose tools for the scale they're actually at. Not the scale they hope to be at some day.

> People should try to make design decisions and choose tools for the scale they're actually at. Not the scale they hope to be at some day.

Would you accept that there is at least some sort of movement of engineers from these large companies to startups? I would argue the choice is made on what people are used to and familiar with, as opposed to "let's signal what scale we want to be at in our choice of tools"

That hasn't been my experience in a decade in the industry. I've never worked at a company with a single person who has worked at any of the big silicon valley tech companies. But I've seen people choose technologies, tools, designs, and processes because that's what company X uses. None of the companies I've worked at have been even a tenth of the size of Google or Facebook. None of the companies has had one one hundredth of the amount of activity in their repositories that you'd find in the Linux kernel.

Not sure if this is still the case, but Google & FB circa 2010 is still a metric shitload of code:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10228399

Why is the mercurial interface better than git? They're pretty similar in most cases besides the branching thing and a couple different commands

Mercurial's interface makes more sense if you're migrating from a svn workflow, for example.

99% of the time, I can get away with:

    hg push/pull/up/commit/diff/status

without additional flags. I can't say the same for git.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com