Whatever your opinion on one tool or another might be - it does seem weird that the "market" has been captured by what you are saying is a lesser product.

IOW, what do you know that nobody else does?

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forrestthewoods 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Worse products win all the time. Inertia is almost impossible to overcome. VHS vs Betamax is a classic. iPod wasn’t the best mp3 player but being a better mp3 player wasn’t enough to claw market share.

Google and Meta don’t use Git and GitHub. Sapling and Phabricator much much better (when supported by a massive internal team)

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aaronbrethorst 7 hours ago | parent [-]

What was the better mp3 player than the iPod?

	▲	corndoge 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		sansa clip+

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guelo 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Network effects and marketing can easily prevent better tools from winning.

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awesome_dude 7 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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WolfeReader 7 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	awesome_dude 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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 :)

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esafak 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That worse is better, and some people don't know better or care.

	▲	dwattttt 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"better" in that sentence is very specific. Worse is also worse, and if you're one of the people for whom the "better" side of a solution doesn't apply, you're left with a mess that people celebrate.

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jrochkind1 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Welcome to VHS and Betamax. the superior product does not always win the market.

	▲	Per_Bothner 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not always, but in this case the superior product (i.e. VHS) won. At initial release, Beta could only record an hour of content, while VHS could record 2 hours. Huge difference in functionality. The quality difference was there, but pretty modest.