alt Hacker News> Well I can explain git to anybody who understands a DAG.
This. Right here. This is the difference.
I can explain Mercurial to people who don't want to understand a DAG.
For non-professional developers, the "merge machinery" is completely worthless.
The difference is that Mercurial lets you duck it until you need it while Git slaps you in the face with it at every commit.
For the non-professional developer, the flow is "commit, commit, commit, commit, whoops--how many commits do I need to go back to fix things?, oh, 2, okay--revert, commit, commit, commit, commit, ...
At no point in their day are they facing "merge". And that makes all the difference.
The non-professional flow you described does not require merging in git either. I suppose most teaching resources about git go deep into merging because it was created for distributed development where that's important, but it doesn't mean you have to teach it to a non-professional like that.
Not that I think mercurial didn't have "simpler" UI back then, but the arguments thrown around in this thread are pretty bollocks.