Run git log on any project that’s more than a year old and you’ll find the truth about a team. Half the messages say “fix”, “update”, “wip”, “asdf”, or my personal favourite — “stuff”. And then one day production breaks, you run git blame on the offending line, and the commit that introduced it just says “minor changes”. Cool. Very helpful. Thanks, past me.
I’ve been writing code for over a decade and I’ll be honest: for the first few years my commit messages were garbage. It wasn’t until I had to debug someone else’s six-month-old code (and then realised the someone else was me) that the penny dropped. A diff tells you what changed. Only the commit message can tell you why. That’s the whole game.
Ninety-four percent of developers use Git [6]. The remaining six percent are mostly in specialized industries — game studios, large finance companies — and even they are slowly migrating. Every other version control system has either died, is in hospice, or survives only in a corner niche. That’s a strange outcome for software one person wrote in about two weeks.
The BitKeeper Incident That Started All of This Git didn’t appear because someone sat down and thought “let me design the perfect version control system.” It appeared because someone yanked a free license away.