Comment by mbork_pl
4 years ago
I guess Git suffers from a similar problem as (La)TeX: it's a truly great prototype which sadly wasn't thrown away to build something better.
Don't get me wrong, I like both TeX and Git _very_ much. (I even co-authored a LaTeX textbook.) I also have a lot of respect for DEK and LT. But they were trailblazers (especially DEK), and so they did a lot of things not knowing their true impact – and sometimes this means these decisions were far from optimal. (The case of TeX is even worse because the machines of the time were very limited compared to what we have today.)
That's a very interesting take. Both were also developed mostly by one person to do one job. Knuth for his “The Art of Computer Programming” masterpiece and Linus for the kernel. There may be similarities that arise from such histories and constrains.