I mean, in the fickle world that is TECH, I am struggling to believe that that's what's happened.
I personally went from .latest.latest.latest.use.this (naming versions as latest) to tortoise SVN (which I struggled with) to Git (which I also was one of those "walk around with a few memorised commands" people that don't actually know how to use it) to reading the fine manual (well 2.5 chapters of it) to being an evangalist.
I've tried Mercurial, and, frankly, it was just as black magic as Git was to me.
That's network effects.
But my counter is - I've not found Mercurial to be any better, not at all.
I have made multiple attempts to use it, but it's just not doing what I want.
And that's why I'm asking, is it any better, or not.
Networking effects are significantly strengthened by necessary user buy in. VC is hard, and every tool demands its users to spend a non-significant amount of time learning it. I would guess the time to move from black magic to understanding most of git is ~100h for most people.
The thing is, to understand which one is actually better, you would have to give the same amount of investment in the second tool, which is not something most people are willing to do if the first tool is "good enough". That's how Python became the default programming language; people don't miss features they do not understand.
A little over a decade ago, with only svn experience, I tried both mercurial and git. There was something about how mercurial handled branches that I found extremely confusing (don't remember what), while git clicked immediately - even without reading the manual.
Mercurial has a more consistent CLI, a really good default GUI (TortoiseHg), and the ability to remember what branch a commit was made on. It's a much easier tool to teach to new developers.
Hmm, that feels a bit subjective - I'm not going to say X is easier than Y when I've just finished saying that I found both tools to have a lot of black magic happening.
But what I will point out, for better or worse, people are now looking at LLMs as Git masters, which is effectively making the LLM the UI which is going to have the effect of removing any assumed advantage of whichever is the "superior" UX
I do wish to make absolutely clear that I personally am not yet ready to completely delegate VCS work to LLMs - as I have pointed out I have what I like to think of as an advanced understanding of the tools, which affords me the luxury of not having an LLM shoot me in the foot, that is soley reserved as my own doing :)
I mean, in the fickle world that is TECH, I am struggling to believe that that's what's happened.
I personally went from .latest.latest.latest.use.this (naming versions as latest) to tortoise SVN (which I struggled with) to Git (which I also was one of those "walk around with a few memorised commands" people that don't actually know how to use it) to reading the fine manual (well 2.5 chapters of it) to being an evangalist.
I've tried Mercurial, and, frankly, it was just as black magic as Git was to me.
That's network effects.
But my counter is - I've not found Mercurial to be any better, not at all.
I have made multiple attempts to use it, but it's just not doing what I want.
And that's why I'm asking, is it any better, or not.
Networking effects are significantly strengthened by necessary user buy in. VC is hard, and every tool demands its users to spend a non-significant amount of time learning it. I would guess the time to move from black magic to understanding most of git is ~100h for most people.
The thing is, to understand which one is actually better, you would have to give the same amount of investment in the second tool, which is not something most people are willing to do if the first tool is "good enough". That's how Python became the default programming language; people don't miss features they do not understand.
A little over a decade ago, with only svn experience, I tried both mercurial and git. There was something about how mercurial handled branches that I found extremely confusing (don't remember what), while git clicked immediately - even without reading the manual.
So at least for me, git was clearly better.
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Mercurial has a more consistent CLI, a really good default GUI (TortoiseHg), and the ability to remember what branch a commit was made on. It's a much easier tool to teach to new developers.
Hmm, that feels a bit subjective - I'm not going to say X is easier than Y when I've just finished saying that I found both tools to have a lot of black magic happening.
But what I will point out, for better or worse, people are now looking at LLMs as Git masters, which is effectively making the LLM the UI which is going to have the effect of removing any assumed advantage of whichever is the "superior" UX
I do wish to make absolutely clear that I personally am not yet ready to completely delegate VCS work to LLMs - as I have pointed out I have what I like to think of as an advanced understanding of the tools, which affords me the luxury of not having an LLM shoot me in the foot, that is soley reserved as my own doing :)