But Git was initially written by one cranky Finn, in ten days.
It totally changed the way we all work.
The delta between what git is now and what it was when first released is massive. Junio Hamano has been a absolute force of a maintainer and steward over the interim 18 years (!!) since 2005.
This story often gets tossed around, as if to imply all of what git is today was put out by Linus in 2 weeks, but I think it suffers from a bit of a hero worship problem. It was no doubt impressive and should be recognized, but I just want to make it clear: Git was made by many people over many years.
Maintainers should get more credit, but the hero worship isn’t entirely misplaced. It’s not often that someone gets to change the world.
I was the original author of multiple systems that have lasted decades, but I'll bet that you'd be hard-pressed to find much of my original code, in the current iterations.
To be fair, Linus was trying to replace Bitkeeper, a proprietary DVCS which he'd been using to maintain the kernel for several years at that point. Mercurial, which runs on similar principles, was around at the time too. He didn't just make a quantum conceptual leap straight from SVM to git on his own in 10 days; he had a pretty good idea what he wanted to build (probably even ideas about the architecture) before he started.
It's still darned impressive; just not supernaturally impressive. :-)
On the other end of that, like what you're talking about, you have the artist who answers "how long did it take you to paint that?" with: "my whole life". I think this holds true in most disciplines and especially in software. The actual code that makes a thing work is trivial - but you have to know which of the 9 gazillion ways of doing it is the one you want, which only comes from experience.
If you know both BitKeeper and Git internals, you can think of their data models as near identical, with BitKeeper implementation using text files and SCCS, and Git using from-scratch data structures.
I'd say that internally git is more consistent %)
And boy does it show!
I constantly use this, having created an alias:
[some other branch]$ git cob feature/foo123 main