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Comment by beaumartinez | Hacker News Reader

The votes are a stark contrast to those of the core Python developers when they were voting on which DVCS to migrate to[1]—although understandably they favoured Mercurial, they disfavoured git. (Bazaar got a good share of votes as well.) The victor's margin was much smaller.

This was all early-2009, though. I wonder if git's increasing popularity has swayed the core PHP developers?

[1] http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0374/#why-mercurial-over-...

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Look at the numbers for uninformed. Really what that survey showed is that the voters were uninformed about their choices.

As a rational human, I look at that data and conclude that the survey was inconclusive.

Not saying that I disagree, but how do you look at votes and conclude that those who cast them were uninformed? Or am I misunderstanding you?

If I understand correctly, there is an explicit 'uninformed' option to choose.

Oh we were talking about the Python votes, not the PHP ones, sorry.

Mercurial is written in Python - as a Python developer I can attest to the phenomenon of Python developers preferring software written in Python. Part of this is rational, part of this is pure "my tribe" bias (by the way, I use and like git, don't know Mercurial at all.)

PHP developers are less likely to be affected by that.

> PHP developers are less likely to be affected by that.

We won't know until someone writes a DVCS in PHP..

hmmmmmmm.....

To be fair, now there exist a library of git function written in pure python. http://www.samba.org/~jelmer/dulwich/

Interesting. I was a barely competent sysadmin that couldn't contain my interest in learning how to develop software. So, over the last 6 months I messed around with Vim and Emacs/ Git, Hg, and Bazaar/ and Erlang, Ruby, Lua and Python. I settled on Emacs, Python, and Git; however, the only choice I made that was overwhelmed by popularity was the choice of learning a DVCS because that is a central piece of the functionality: how easy it is to collaborate (as beginner I will fail w/o more informed collaborators). I realize I will have to spend lots of time on my chosen setup, but I hope in a few years I can make transitions more easily.

Mercurial has quite a few merits! I like git but I like hg better.

The main thing (to me) git has going for it, is GitHub. Even though BitBucket is getting better; it's still not GitHub.

OTOH, bitbucket has free private hosting and git doesn't (AFAIK). I think that is a crucial point for a beginner who is just learning to code and doesn't want to a) pay money, or b) have his ugly code be visible to the world.

Don't be afraid to show your code to the world. Better yet, paste some in a pastebin and ask for tips in an IRC channel: it'll make you a better developer.

It's often hard to get people on IRC to actually respond to a pastebin more than 15 lines long. IRC is good for "Can you tell you why my function is busted," but not so much for "How can I improve the architecture of my 500 line app". (The usual first answer to that, BTW, is "Reduce your 500 line app to 300 lines without removing any functionality")

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