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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

I am keenly aware of how common Git is.

A whole generation of programmers have only ever known Git and GitHub. They assume that since it is the standard it must be good. This is a fallacy.

Bad things can become popular and become entrenched even when better things exist. Replacing Git today would require something not just a little better but radically better. Git was always worse than Mercurial. It won because of GitHub. If MercurialHub had been invented instead we’d all be using that and would be much happier. Alas.

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> Git was always worse than Mercurial.

hard disagree. Git was always way better than Mercurial.

> It won because of GitHub.

I and most of the developers I have worked with over the years all used git for many years before ever even trying GitHub. GitHub obviously has helped adoption, but I'm not convinced that git would not have won even if GitHub had never existed.

> Git was always way better than Mercurial.

How is Git better than Mercurial in any way nevermind "always way better". Serious question.

I'd possibly accept "the original Mercurial implementation was Python which was slow". And perhaps that's why Git won rather than GitHub. But I don't think so.

So none of the stuff you’re using qualifies as “adult projects”?

I don’t object to saying we can do better than git. But saying git “is for hobby side projects” is ridiculous. It’s fine for serious projects.

Depends on how snarky I’m feeling. I’m not sure that webdev counts as wearing big boy pants if I’m feeling frisky! It’d be interesting to analyze how much of the stack used Git as its source of truth versus being mirrored by a BigTech adult VCS!

Git sucks for serious projects. It’s certainly what many people use. But I don’t think “we can do better” is a strong enough statement. Git is bad and sucks. It’s functional but bad. We can do much much better than Git.

I like to rant about Git because we will never do better unless people demand it. If people think it’s good enough then we’ll never get something better. That makes me sad.

I work at a big tech company. Everything is git. I’m not just referring to the web bits, I mean the whole OS down to the kernel.

I’m sorry for your loss :(

> Git sucks for serious projects.

again, hard disagree. I work on serious projects all day long. Git is fabulous for serious projects.

I hope that someday you get to experience a VCS tool that doesn't suck.

What are we missing?

> Git was always worse than Mercurial. It won because of GitHub. If MercurialHub had been invented instead we’d all be using that and would be much happier.

MercurialHub was invented. It’s called Bitbucket, it was founded around the same time as GitHub, and it started out with Mercurial. People wanted Git, so Bitbucket was forced to switch to Git.

> People wanted Git

No. If Bitbucket competed with MercurialHub then MercurialHub would still have won and we’d all be much happier today.

Bitbucket was your desired MercurialHub. They supported Mercurial first. Then they added Git support because people wanted Git. At that point, Bitbucket users could choose between Git and Mercurial. They chose Git, so much so that Bitbucket stopped supporting Mercurial.

Look, I get that you hate Git, but people had the choice of using Mercurial or Git – on the same platform even – and they overwhelmingly chose Git. You claiming that Mercurial would win in a fair fight ignores the fact that that fight did actually happen and Mercurial lost.

You’re acting like the only different between GitHub and Bitbucket was the choice of VCS tool. That’s obviously not even remotely true. GitHub was a superior platform that was more pleasant to use than Bitbucket. The choice of Git had nothing to do with that.

GitHub won. Not Git. IMHO.

The only difference between using Bitbucket with Mercurial and using Bitbucket with Git was the choice of VCS tool. And people chose Git.

> If MercurialHub had been invented instead we’d all be using that

This existed. We aren’t.

I used both. I disrespectfully disagree.

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