←back to thread

Dolt is Git for data

(www.dolthub.com)
358 points timsehn | 1 comments | 30 Mar 20 20:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.396s | source
Show context
peteforde ◴[31 Mar 20 03:02 UTC] No.22734564[source]▶
Only 39 days since the last "GitHub for data" was announced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22375774

I'll say what I said in February: I started a company with the same premise 9 years ago, during the prime "big data" hype cycle. We burned through a lot of investor money only to realize that there was not a market opportunity to capture. That is, many people thought it was cool - we even did co-sponsored data contests with The Economist - but at the end of the day, we couldn't find anyone with an urgent problem that they were willing to pay to solve.

I wish these folks luck! Perhaps things have changed; we were part of a flock of 5 or 10 similar projects and I'm pretty sure the only one still around today is Kaggle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWMjQhhxhQ4

replies(15): >>22734677 #>>22734738 #>>22734742 #>>22734839 #>>22735019 #>>22735030 #>>22735213 #>>22735358 #>>22735661 #>>22736049 #>>22736513 #>>22736785 #>>22737514 #>>22737860 #>>22738642 #
philipov ◴[31 Mar 20 04:02 UTC] No.22734839[source]▶
Git succeeded because it was free, and then business models were able to be built up around the open-source ecosystem after a market evolved naturally. There is a need, but if you go into it trying to build a business from scratch, you're going to have a bad time.
replies(2): >>22735082 #>>22735219 #
TylerE ◴[31 Mar 20 05:12 UTC] No.22735082[source]▶
Git succeeded because of Linus.

Sure as hell wasn't because of the UX, else Mercurial would have won, or even DARCS.

99.99999% of projects are not the Linux kernel

replies(7): >>22735432 #>>22735442 #>>22735596 #>>22735880 #>>22736021 #>>22736399 #>>22737152 #
greggman3 ◴[31 Mar 20 06:54 UTC] No.22735442[source]▶
Mercurial would not have won. Mercurial has since added features, that are not the recommended workflow according to their docs, to have similar branching model to git but the default "as designed" workflow of hg is arguably inferior to git (yes, I know that word will get downvoted).

Without git, git's style of branching would likely never have been added to hg and even though it's been added now AFAICT hg people don't use it. No idea why. Git people get how much freedom git branches give them, freedom that other vcs, include hg don't/didn't.

replies(2): >>22735510 #>>22735515 #
koonsolo ◴[31 Mar 20 07:15 UTC] No.22735510[source]▶
Git branching is not intuitive, because they are not branches but pointers/labels. When you talk about the master branch, you actually talk about the master pointer.

The other VCSes have an intuitive concept of branches, because they are in fact branches.

I liked Mercurial more than Git, but when BitBucked dropped Mercurial I also switched to Git.

replies(4): >>22735889 #>>22735990 #>>22736020 #>>22736421 #
1. ynx ◴[31 Mar 20 08:48 UTC] No.22735889[source]▶
I must be an outlier, because it's always been the opposite for me.

I started on Mercurial and didn't use Git for years. The moment I switched to Git everything made so much more sense to me. Mercurial seemed like it did magic and wouldn't explain it to you. There were multiple kinds of branches, there were revision numbers, octopus merges were impossible to understand, the whole thing tried to act immutable but effective workflows included history editing for squashing and merging and amending and cherry-picking, which is anything but. Partial commits were a little bit of a mystery to me, and shelves seemed to be their own separate thing.

To me Git was simple in comparison. The working copy was the last state at the end of a long sequence of states. Patches were just the way you represented going from one state to another, rather than canonical, so you woujldn't resolve an octopus merge so much as you would get to your desired state and call it a day. Branches were labels to a particular state. Stashes were labels with an optimized workflow. Reflog was just a list of temporary-ish labels. New commits were built against the index, which you could add or remove to independently of file state. Branches were branches were branches, no matter where the repository was. Disconnecting from upstream was simply a matter of removing a remote.

I know it doesn't match up with other people, but I simply have never been able to see Mercurial as an example of a good tool /despite starting on it/. It's always been easier to use git at any level of complexity I need it depending on the problem I'm solving, whether it's saving code or rescuing a totally botched interactive rebase, merge, etc.