Wait. What? Git is 20 years old? How can that be? I’m sure it was just yesterday that Linus announced the Git project after his arrangement with Larry McVoy’s BitKeeper imploded. That’s a sad story in itself but this post is just about how surprised I am that Git is 20 years old.
I started using Git fairly early on and soon after it became available, I moved to Magit. In the intervening years, Git has taken over the VCS mindspace. At this point, virtually everyone without very special requirements uses it.
There’s an argument to made that BitKeeper is the better solution and McVoy has made that argument in the past but BitKeeper was proprietary software in an age when developers pretty much insisted on open source tools. McVoy, to his credit, has accepted this and is devoting his time to fishing.
Whether or not Git is the best solution it has emerged as the default solution and that, I think, is a good thing. It’s definitely a good VCS and having a standardized VCS benefits us all. I have no doubt that its distributed nature is the correct answer and 20 years of Git and BitKeeper before it has proven that to be the case.
The article that I linked above has a nice history of Git and its origins. If you weren’t there to experience it, you may enjoy discovering some of that history