alt Hacker News> I helped them make the wrong choice, Mercurial.
20 years ago, Mercurial was not the wrong choice.
- Its internal design was very similar to Git's.
- Its cross-platform support was superior to Git's. (Git didn't get good Windows support until some years later.)
- Its ergonomics were superior to Git's, which was an important factor on its own, and especially important when trying to get a whole organization to retrain and retool around a distributed model.
- (It had a third major advantage over Git that I unfortunately cannot recall at the moment.)
So you weren't wrong back then...
...but Git improved over time, tipping the scale closer to a balanced state. It also had unbeatable author recognition, making it the obvious choice for anyone unaware of Mercurial's advantages, and eventually leading it to benefit from the network effect. And GitHub appeared, greatly improving Git's ecosystem with no support for Mercurial.
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I don't know what you mean by ergonomics, but I remember trying both Mercurial and Git back in the days after using Subversion before. I didn't like how Mercurial didn't easily let me rewrite history and do stuff like `git commit --ammend` or `git rebase`. Mercurial users kept telling me using an extension to manage patches on top of Mercurial (I think it was quilt).
I agree about the Windows support. hg serve was also nice. Plus TortoiseHg.
> Its ergonomics were superior to Git's
That's a matter of taste. I used both for serious work, at the time, and found Git much more usable. My experience with Mercurial was "welcome to Mercurial, how can we help you merge and push your work in progress even though that's not what you want?" My experience with Git was one where I felt in control at all times, had a clear workflow for when I did and didn't want to publish my changes (and for when I wanted to edit them first), and allowed me to quickly make and switch branches within a single working copy.