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In a long tradition of comparing some aspect of computers with some other aspect of real life comes: "If programming languages were religions". There is one flaw with this article, though: programming languages are religions.

In similar spirit to “If operating systems were airlines” John Goerzen has written about what it would be like if version control systems were airlines.

For the record, I've used RCS, CVS, Subversion, tla and git, and I generally agree with John's assessments. RCS was horrible. CVS was a great improvement over RCS, and Subversion was a great improvement over CVS. (Except that every once in a while, Subversion would decide that it wanted to change its on-disk format.) tla was revolutionary in its day, but it's complicated (“tla help” is 198 lines long and lists 114 commands), and kind of slow (yes, I know I need to use cacherevs). I've only started learning git, and it seems like a pretty nice system. And it's supposed to be very fast (it was created to handle the whole Linux kernel).