United States
A jack of all trades and master of some, Matt Attaway has worked as a tester, developer, researcher, designer, manager, devops engineer and elephant trainer. He currently manages the open source development group at Perforce Software, but prior to that he lead a test team working on the highest profile projects at Perforce. When not tinkering with the latest software development pipeline tools Matt enjoys experimenting with cocktails and playing games of all sorts; preferably at the same time.
Authored Comments
That is definitely more accurate; Git just happens to be the system most people know about. With the popularity of GitHub and Git's usage in the Android and iOS dev worlds it's easy for DVCS to get conflated with Git, but there are other great open source tools that shouldn't be forgotten.
Being written by Linus gave Git a platform that other tools would be hard pressed to match. If he had written Hg I suspect we'd all be talk about Hg and MercHub.
That said I'm very excited about some of the work that Hg is doing; the ability to safely rewrite published history that they are talking about could be game changing and really push what we all expect out of our version control systems. Hooray for competition!
I'd agree that the syntax inconsistencies can and should be fixed, but it feels to me the lack of guardrails, the reliance on the reflog, and the impermanence of history that Losh talks about in his Git Koans are unlikely to change. They also strike me as part of the reason Git is considered to be very powerful and flexible; there's very little it will stop you from doing.
I'd really like to spend some more quality time with Mercurial; the bit that I've spent so far has lead me to believe it has almost all of the power but with a much more consistent interface.