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Why I develop on Windows

blog.shortround.dev

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Re: Why I develop on Windows

#3

Post by hesdeadjim »

After 8 years on macOS, I was forced into developing on Windows back in 2015 when I was making a VR game. WSL1 hit at exactly that time and once I suffered through setting up the environment on ConEmu (Windows Terminal nowadays is wonderful), I never looked back.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#6

Post by causality0 »

thomasjb wrote: post #4

I keep on seeing all this talk about Powershell, and it's inspiring me to maybe learn some, although I've already commenced pursuit of skill in bash and python

Telling ChatGPT to write you a powershell script and then explain what every part of it does makes learning it really fast. It's super handy. Powershell scripts have solved so many time consuming problems for me, like having one-click shortcuts for changing my desktop resolution or fixing all the file names in a 20TB media archive.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#7

Post by chaxor »

revskill wrote: post #5

apt-get install package- is a nightmare, because it's hard to know which version is the correct one.

Yeah, it's so awful - and IMO windows solves this problem really well.

You just don't ever get to build anything - so problem solved! :)

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#9

Post by deathanatos »

> If the software is written well, it will be sufficiently cross-platform and modular enough

Yes … well …

We brought on via acquisition a bunch of Windows devs. It turns out we can't even clone the repository onto their laptops: some files in the repo have ":" in the filename, which is forbidden. There's a "aux.rs", also a verboten filename in Windows. And then there were some that differed only in case, which honestly I don't know how we manage that, as the non-Windows side is macOS, and yet roughly once per year someone introduces two files, same name, differing case into the repo.

> that "CRT" shader

Okay … that's not what CRTs looked like. Like, the curve seems way overdone compared to my memory, and IIRC the "lines" affect was really only visible on TV/camera. I have no memory of noticing it IRL, and I spent plenty of time at a command prompt.

(E.g., this random example — https://i.redd.it/1s3ny22b2va51.jpg — matches my memory pretty closely.)

(Also there were flat screen CRTs, but those were relatively late to the game and were rapidly obsoleted by actual flat screens.)

Edit: but also I want to play a round of Hack¹ with that shader.

¹i.e., quest for The Amulet of Yendor; you might know the newer incarnation, NetHack, but I didn't play that until flat screens, I think; the CRT time would have been on Hack.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#10

Post by lucb1e »

> I know a lot of developers who will opt to do all of their scripting in python these days, even putting #!/bin/python3 at the head of a script so that it runs through the shell.

...which is exactly what you're meant to do.

This is not an example of how bad Bash it, it shows that you didn't understand what Bash is. It's expected to use various languages to write code on Linux, nobody wants you to do things in a language that wasn't made for the task.

Imagine you had to use Python on the shell and, any time you open a terminal, needed to import os and do something like print(os.path.glob("*")) instead of just opening a terminal and typing "ls" to get your directory listing. Different tools for different jobs.

Also the point they try to make about bash looking like a foreign language and having weird syntax. Yes, that's the thing: it's a very specific thing called a shell, not just any old programming language that you're meant to use for things that are not shell scripts. If Python feels more natural to you, that's probably what you should be using. Don't feel like you need to use Bash for bigger tasks than a few lines of code for no reason other than because you're on a system that has it.

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