Comment by bsder

> We were imposed GitHub for so many exercises!

I'm sympathetic to both sides here.

As a professor who had to run Subversion for students (a bit before Git, et al), it's a nightmare to put the infrastructure together, keep it reliable under spiky loads (there is always a crush at the deadline), be customer support for students who manage to do something weird or lose their password, etc. You wind up spending a non-trivial amount of time being sysadmin for the class on top of your teaching duties. Being able to say "Put it on GitHub" short circuits all of that. It sucks, but it makes life a huge amount easier for the professor.

From the students point of view, sure, it sucks that nobody mentioned that Git could be used independently (or jj or Mercurial or ...) However, Github is going to be better than what 99.9% of all professors will put together or be able to use. Sure, you can use Git by itself, but then it needs to go somewhere that the professor can look at it, get submitted to automated testing, etc. That's not a trivial step. My students were happy that I had the "Best Homework Submission System" (said about Subversion of all things ...) because everybody else used the dumbass university enterprise thing that was completely useless (not going to mention its name because it deserves to die in the blazing fires of the lowest circle of Hell). However, it wasn't straightforward for me to put that together. And the probability of getting a professor with my motivation and skill is pretty low.