Re:Git undo: We can do better
by ryandrake on Monday June 21, 2021 @01:18PM
(#27581268)
Although it sounds like a silly reason, compare the names themselves. I don’t even know how to pronounce “mercurial” without looking it up. The word doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue like git does. And then the command itself is “hg”. WTF is up with that? I mean, ha-ha we all get the joke, but was the program made for chemists? Unnecessarily clever. Don’t underestimate the extent to which a difficult/confusing name/brand can harm adoption.
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Re:Git undo: We can do better
by Al-Khwarizmi on Monday June 21, 2021 @07:43PM
(#27586032)
For non-native speakers it's much more obvious how to pronounce mercurial than git. Mercurial can only be pronounced like mercury, I guess, is there any other sensible choice? But in git, it's not obvious if the g is pronounced as in get or as in gin until you look it up.
> I don’t even know how to pronounce “mercurial”
But you do know how to pronounce "Unnecessarily"?
I think for most people, they would encounter it in a science class early in life (at least for English speakers). And Hg is just the chemical symbol for mercury, https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/element/Mercury#section=Ide...