A mix of fun and surprising facts about Git
📝 Origins & Name
- Created by Linus Torvalds in 2005 — the same person who created Linux.
- He jokingly called it “Git” because in British slang it means an unpleasant person, poking fun at himself.
- Linus created Git in just two weeks after a licensing dispute with BitKeeper (the system the Linux kernel used before Git).
⚡ Speed & Design
- Git was designed to be blazingly fast — a key reason Linus wrote it himself.
- It’s optimized for branching and merging — something that was painful in other systems at the time.
- Git stores snapshots, not differences — making operations like checking out, reverting, and branching faster and more reliable.
🧠 Under the Hood
- Everything in Git is identified by a SHA-1 hash (40-character string). This makes it extremely reliable for detecting corruption or tampering.
- A Git repository is essentially a key-value data store — branches, commits, and tags are just pointers to objects.
- Git’s
.gitfolder contains the entire repository history. If you copy just that folder, you’ve copied the repo.
🌍 Popularity
- Git is now the most widely used version control system in the world, powering GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and countless self-hosted servers.
- GitHub started in 2008, only three years after Git was created.
- The largest public Git repo (by number of commits and size) changes often, but projects like the Linux kernel remain massive showcases of Git’s scalability.
🎩 Fun Tricks
- You can create branches with emoji names 🐱👤.
- The command
git reflogis like a time machine — you can recover commits you thought were lost. - Git’s “plumbing” commands (like
git cat-fileandgit rev-parse) let you peek deep inside the repo and treat it like a database.
🏆 Cultural Impact
- Git popularized concepts like pull requests (thanks to GitHub’s interface).
- Its distributed model means you can have a complete copy of a project offline — very different from older centralized systems like Subversion (SVN).
- Git has inspired non-software uses, such as tracking research papers, books, legal documents, and even recipes.
Top comments (1)
The funny thing is, perhaps Git popularized concepts like request pull, but thanks to GitHub, it was somewhat diminished, as GitHub is centralized, while git is decentralized, as GitHub became more popular.