Git is one of those bizarre products that has remained a leader in its category for almost a decade while being extremely difficult to use, even for experts. Another one of these products is Apache.
Why is this?
At least from my naive point of view I would expect these extremely user-hostile products to have been overtaken but more user-friendly alternatives. I know the best products don't always win, but when they don't there's often at least some theory about what is going on (network effects, business partnership, government regulation, etc.) that I don't have with these two products.
It has remained popular because it feels like the correct approach in almost every situation, despite having a difficult, obtuse UI. After spending years with Microsoft's centralized version control and then switching to Git it's like a breath of fresh air.
Granted, I almost never use the Git command line and always favor a 3rd party GUI. For users who are a tad confused I think this is the right approach. And to me that's what makes Git a winner: the core software is powerful enough to do everything that needs to be done, and you can pick whatever UI you're comfortable with. No one is forcing you to use Git's built-in UI.
That said I think even the high-level Git concepts have naming that confuses new users. "Pull request" annoyed me for a long time. Yes I technically understood why they chose that term, but practically speaking it just seemed pointlessly misleading.
I would guess that network effects and the amount of quality tools built on top of Git are the main reason for its prevalence.
Fossil and Darcs sure look nice, but having to self-host my repositories or use a smaller company that could go under at any minute? Having to use barely-maintained plugins for my editor, CI, CD, etc.? And most importantly, having to explain a completely new set of tools to anyone who wants to work on my projects? In my opinion, it just isn't worth it.
This is a really, really good question. Some things:
- It's fast, which we all love.
- It mostly does painless merges, again we love.
- It's not actually that hard to 'get going' - and I think that a lot of people are totally overconfident in their skills.
- It's free
- It's open source
- Linus Torvalds created the critical mass for Linux
- GitHub
- Lack of truly efficient alternatives
- It technically 'works' i.e. does what it's supposed to do, relatively robustly.
- It's designed for open source, which is a novel concept.
Personally, I'm scared of git from an organizational perspective, and I do not feel that we have reconciled the reality of how much pain it can cause to people, newer teams, the less familiar etc..
If people would pay for software I wonder if a great alternative could come to the fore because without it, we have to rely on volunteers and that's an ugly industry problem.
Apache is popular because writing a fully spec compliant HTTP server is actually quite difficult. We use it, I don't like it, but I have enough experience with HTTP to know to not write my own implementation, especially in C/C++.
When I was at the university I thought is was cool to do my project reports and thesis in LaTeX, bought all well known reference books, and advocated it everywhere.
Now a couple of decades later, I just use Word or Pages.
Why is this?
At least from my naive point of view I would expect these extremely user-hostile products to have been overtaken but more user-friendly alternatives. I know the best products don't always win, but when they don't there's often at least some theory about what is going on (network effects, business partnership, government regulation, etc.) that I don't have with these two products.