In 2012, the question should be Git or Mercurial?
Your point is well taken, but it may still be necessary to know others - for example, I work at a large and well-known Internet company and we use Perforce =)
Ask HN: Learn Subversion or Git?
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Re: Ask HN: Learn Subversion or Git?
#12Use / learn Git, however it wouldn't be terrible to know both.
Re: Ask HN: Learn Subversion or Git?
#13In 2012, the question should be Git or Mercurial?
I am not familiar with Mercurial. Would it benefit students to learn it over Git?
Go with Git. Although I never used Mercurial personally, I considered it at one point because it was in Python but someone else mentioned the fact that there is a version difference because of the split between Python 2 and Python 3. That can complicate things.
Re: Ask HN: Learn Subversion or Git?
#14One of the big advantages of Git over Subversion in a teaching context is that, due to it's decentralized nature, every git repository is fully self-contained and stands on its own.
So for experimenting it's much easier to create a git repository in one directory of your (Windows/Linux/MacOS/...) home directory, add files, then clone it to a second directory, change things, push back, ... You don't have to bother setting up a subversion server!