You read that right - “an unpleasant or contemptible person” - this is what “git” means in British English.
It’s not a crazy coincidence that it resembles the “git” tool we use day in and day out. In fact - the meaning is the inspiration behind naming “git” as “git”.
You see - when Linus Torvalds (yup - the creator of Linux kernel) was developing the Linux kernel - he was frustrated with the limitations of the then prevailing VCS (version control system) - “BitKeeper”. This is what Linux developers were using but it stopped being free.
And that was it - Linus and his team started developing “git” which sprang to life in April 2005.
Here is the very first commit Linus made on git
Shortly thereafter, the first Linux commit was made which dumped the entire Linux kernel in one go:
Wondering how many lines of code?
Yes - that’s 6.7 Million lines of code.
Linus - once convinced that git was working as expected - handed over the project to Junio Hamano who has been the primary maintainer of git ever since.
Thought of stalking him on LinkedIn and wasn’t surprised by his LinkedIn username:
Hope it was a fun quick read :)
We all know about git - but that’s not the only VCS:
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