Github is better than any other source hosting system I've used for
several reasons; most of it centers around the web-interface. It's
easy to gloss over the importance of the web-interface by just calling
it "cool", but it's considered "cool" because it has several major
functional advantages over similar tools; things that actually get
work done faster, or make work that's otherwise unfeasibly hard, easy.
Some of these are enormities like being heavily driven by ajax, so you
can pop through a whole tree of source files and quickly view items,
or perform operations on them (which overall leads to maybe an order-
of-magnitude speed boost on navigation). Some of these are patches
over shaky or missing functionality in most source control systems
(like being able to comment on commits after making them, since afaik
you can't edit pushed commit messages). Some of these are tracking
features to see where your code is going outside the project; see what
other projects are re-using your stuff, and find things from them you
can pull back into your own source. Some of these are just tons of
little helpful items in the gui that replace long, complex operations
with the commandline with something instant and discoverable. A great
deal of it has to do with the interface requiring no education; the
way to do something doesn't have to be learned, doesn't have to be
gleaned by stumbling through stackoverflow and reading a bunch of
tutorials - it's just *right there*, under your mouse, plain as day.
Etc, etc. It all adds up. It's only little features, each after
another, but pretty soon it adds up to the difference between hotmail
and gmail. I'm probably inaccurate about some of the details above;
maybe there is some backwards way to do certain things on sourceforge
- maybe there are some features which actually are possible to do with
some script setup ... but it's just ... why would you bother? Why
waste the time and effort when you can get it all for free? I've used
sourceforge for years now, and it's a damning indictment that I really
don't know what, all, they can do, because their site is so time-
consuming to slog through.
A friend of mine stated it most simply by saying that if they were
using any other site, they wouldn't use the web interface; they'd just
stick to using a commandline, and treat the host as a dumb pipe. With
github, it's mostly the other way around.
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