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Comment by hresvelgr | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of people trying to capitalize on GitHub's recent failings, and I feel like everyone trying to shoot their shot in this space is missing one key aspect: Git is a terrible TERRIBLE piece of software.

I have spent a considerable amount of time learning git, not because I wanted to, but because someone else in my team didn't and inevitably t-boned our repository with a proverbial freight train running commands they didn't understand. It is absolutely unacceptable for a program designed EXACTLY for the purpose of maintaining a history and backup of the evolution of a program to be so unwieldy and occasionally dangerous to use. We can absolutely do better than Git.

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Not asking to be pokey, genuinely curious because I have heard similar from a consistent couple camps... what stack you develop in and what VCS do you prefer?

Ironically, Git is my preferred VCS. I have used Perforce Helix, Mercurial, and SVN. It is the best of the worst. I don't think anyone in the space has made a truly great product.

Painting with a broad brush I feel like the people who still don't like git either worked with mercurial and liked it more, want to be sort of hipster or counter culture and use fossil, or work in microsoft shops or game dev shops.

Sample size is small but it's been consistent for me over the past 20 years.

I like p4/helix for the locking when working on something like a game where you need assets to be handled more carefully since there's a lot of binary floating around but despise the company and the sales / licensing games. I had a rep just ignore me completely when I emailed wanting to cancel and ended up having to go find the director of the sales org on linkedin and get him involved (and it was cancelled within 24 hours).

This sounds like a process + human problem, not a technology problem. To me, it sounds like your team lacks discipline and competence. Sorry bud, going to categorically disagree with your sentiment that git is terrible.

Exactly. Git is an amazing piece of software. If a team can’t use Git, which is still the simplest and most reliable way to track project history, I wouldn’t have much confidence in their ability to produce quality software.

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