Ashley Moran wrote:
On Aug 03, 2008, at 3:36 pm, David Bremner wrote:
I think this view is probably coloured by your background in web development. I have used git for about a year now, and never visited GitHub. I'm not saying you have to like git, but it does have other features other than a snazzy web site.
Hi David
I think I gave the wrong impression there. After all, I use darcs despite it not having a snazzy website! What I mean is that git usage has snowballed since GitHub was released, so people are clearly attracted to the website first, and the SCM second. It's a bit like the way Rails created thousands of Ruby programmers by association, many of them with no idea what Ruby was all about, just a vague notion that Rails could solve their problem.
I know of exactly 0 programmers that use Git because of GitHub. I have interacted with exactly 1 project that used GitHub. I know of many, many programmers that use Git. Git people are choosing Git for other reasons. I've spelled out some of the reasons I chose it before; I could bore you with URLs if you like ;-) Git is a really nice DVCS. That has nothing to do with the presence of one particular website.
I tend to very stubbornly work the other way... choose the tool I think works best with very little regard for its momentum, unless of course it clearly has none. Hence my love of darcs and recent interest in Haskell. (I'll figure it out, one day!)
Haskell has momentum, I swear!
There's also discussion on darcs-users that a Haskell implementation of Git would finally settle the "Haskell is too slow" debate. Now I think if the world is going to use git, a better implementation would be a good thing (I know a developer who got VERY frustrated trying to program against it). Personally I think the developer time would be better invested in fixing darcs bugs and improving its performance.
Yes, I am not sure the world needs a reimplemented Git. As a user, I would say, "what's the benefit?" I don't see one. That's an awful lot of work. As a developer, yes Git's internals are, shall we say, inconsistent. But what do I care? Git's interface is a shell tool, and I can use any programming language I want to work with it. I've already done so with sh, Haskell, and (ugh) Ruby. -- John