On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 9:36 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu <seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org> wrote: > Daniel Keep wrote: >> >> Warning: semi-rant ahead. Feel free to ignore. :) > > [...] >> >> Windows is a pain in the arse, and there isn't a day that goes by where >> I don't wish I could get rid of it from my life. But the fact is that >> it's STILL better than Linux. >> >> Andrei said that Windows is for users, and unix is for programmers. >> That's fine; I'm a programmer! But I'm also a user. I shouldn't have >> to spend all day to work out how to do something in linux that's trivial >> in Windows. > > What you don't realize is that you spend all day to work out how to do > something in Windows that's trivial in Unix. And that "something" is writing > computer programs. I agree that winamp, games, ..., are much more polished > in Windows. I mean, it's a foregone conclusion. It's the core market of > Windows! > > Now here's the thing: mono-culturalism is worse than either Windows or Unix > bigotry. If you know the OS, go ahead, rant all you want about it. But I > have little consideration for rants against some OS from people who don't > know it. > > And the situation isn't symmetric, which is liable to raise an eyebrow. I > only know two persons who know Unix and prefer Windows. One worked for > Microsoft, the other loves every big American company and is in fact a > Microsoft fan (nothing wrong with that). All others I know disliking Unix > actually don't know it. On the other hand, I know plenty of programmers who > know both Unix and Windows programming and can't bring themselves to think > seriously about getting work done in Windows. I also know Unix zealots who > have no idea about Windows, and their rants are pretty damaging (Richard > Stallman only tried to use Word once and was unable to do anything with it - > too many confusing menus and buttons... a sad case of monoculture.) Finally, > programmers who only know Windows kind of just don't know better so they > take it as a given without becoming fans and that's that.
I think your "for users" vs "for programmers" distinction is quite apt. Overall I would prefer to program under Unix (although I'd still like to keep the Visual Studio debugger :-P), but to do user things under Windows. Problem is those user-things sort of happen intermittently throughout the day, and in the end I find that with Cygwin, emacs, etc. the programming environment under Windows is more tolerable to me than the user environment under Linux. So I'm happier overall under Windows. I do keep a VMware Ubuntu handy, though, and fire it up once a week or so. Usually to play around with some 3rd party code that hasn't been ported to Windows, or use some tool that I couldn't get to work easily under cygwin. As for pathetic little cmd.com, Microsoft seems to be trying to do something new in the shell area with the PowerShell. I tried it out a bit, but it's quite a change from a typical command line shell. Not sure how long it would take to get the hang of it. The impression I get is that the main point of it is to give you a way to control everything about Windows using scripts, which is good. Kind of reminiscent of AppleScript in that sense. I think it also has a not-so-brain-dead programming language for scripting. The fact that they are at least attempting to do something to improve the shell under Windows is promising, at least. --bb