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Why I develop on Windows

blog.shortround.dev

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Re: Why I develop on Windows

#41

Post by chrisweekly »

selectodude wrote: post #25
jmbwell wrote: post #11

Complaining that bash on macOS is old is valid, but it doesn’t seem relevant here. If you’re just going to use Powershell on Windows anyway, then surely bash doesn’t matter on either platform. More relevant in my view is how well the workstation you use supports interacting with your build system. In many organizations, the actual build environment is only ever going to be Debian or alpine in a container, in which ca…

Mac OS switched to zsh a couple releases ago due to bash being GPL 3 so the shell isn’t old anymore and installing bash is as easy as brew install bash.

The default OS-provided shell is irrelevant; anyone who cares an iota about DX on their dev machine is going to set up their terminal and shell from scratch anyway.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#42

Post by doorhammer »

justeleblanc wrote: post #33
doorhammer wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The powershell command names though Just wondering if you're talking about command name length or something else? Asking because it comes up a lot and almost all the common commands have idiomatic short/terse versions (gci for Get-ChildItem, etc). No shade, though. No reason you'd know if you don't have a reason to know it. Would love to hear if I'm making the wrong assumption and it's something else you're talking…

It's just a knee-jerk reaction people have in any thread where powershell is mentioned. "Hur hur long command names." Doesn't bring anything to the discussion.

Yeah, it can definitely be kind of a meme, but also I've never had a bad time bringing it up in good faith. A lot of people don't even realize it's a knee-jerk meme response to them. OP also doesn't seem to just be MS bashing, and I think there's a reality that the typical linux/macos dev just doesn't have a compelling reason to sink time into vetting PS, whereas I had a reason to learn it and ended up really digging it.

But I do get what you're saying and think it's a common meme that's often unhelpful

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#43

Post by emodendroket »

lucb1e wrote: post #13
lucb1e wrote: post #10

> 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 lang…

To be fair to OP, I would then go on to label these people as equally ignorant: > A lot of people coming from the Unix-like world of macOS and Linux don't tend to know [PS]. Many people don't know it even exists at all. When I mention the Windows Terminal to people, they think I'm talking about the Windows Command Prompt, a crappy little program I know that PS and the new terminal is not the same as cmd.exe, and that…

On the C# IDE front, Rider is excellent on all platforms (even on Windows I prefer it over VS), and a lot of production C# software is now running on Linux. It's not limited the way it used to be.

For PS, the other thing is I think people hear "object-oriented shell" and think every command has to be custom-built to interface with all the others and isn't pluggable like standard pipes, but that is untrue.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#44

Post by Kye »

aprilnya wrote: post #32
matthewmorgan wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could they keep the files in WSL and run their IDEs in Windows?

not sure about other IDEs, but VSCode has very good WSL integration for doing this iirc

You can type code inside a WSL shell and get a VSCode configured to work inside it.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#45

Post by emodendroket »

smoldesu wrote: post #26
lucb1e wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to OP, I would then go on to label these people as equally ignorant: > A lot of people coming from the Unix-like world of macOS and Linux don't tend to know [PS]. Many people don't know it even exists at all. When I mention the Windows Terminal to people, they think I'm talking about the Windows Command Prompt, a crappy little program I know that PS and the new terminal is not the same as cmd.exe, and that…

Yeah. Reading the 3-pipe solution in bash versus 4-pipe solution in Powershell felt like it was verging on parody. Yes, these object-oriented features are nice - but they're something of a self-imposed problem on an OS that's designed like a database. Even the tools we use to parse JSON in bash aren't all that bad, if you can keep yourself grounded in the world of text processing. I'm glad that the OP has a workflow…

If the long command names bother you so much most have short aliases, but it's worth remembering that the short ones are cryptic and not that instructive if you're not already initiated.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#46

Post by systemtest »

deathanatos wrote: post #9

> 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 honest…

I had a bug last week. Some people on the team had certain files missing in ZIP-files generated by our back-end. So I downloaded the ZIP-files from the back-end and it worked fine for me. Asked them to sent me the ZIP-files directly, I could extract all files. I had no clue why it didn't work for them but I knew that they ran Windows. So I installed Windows 10 22H2 in a VM and as it turns out, having "->" in the filename causes Windows to ignore those files when extracting a ZIP-file.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#48

Post by lucb1e »

doorhammer wrote: post #23
lucb1e wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to OP, I would then go on to label these people as equally ignorant: > A lot of people coming from the Unix-like world of macOS and Linux don't tend to know [PS]. Many people don't know it even exists at all. When I mention the Windows Terminal to people, they think I'm talking about the Windows Command Prompt, a crappy little program I know that PS and the new terminal is not the same as cmd.exe, and that…

> The powershell command names though Just wondering if you're talking about command name length or something else? Asking because it comes up a lot and almost all the common commands have idiomatic short/terse versions (gci for Get-ChildItem, etc). No shade, though. No reason you'd know if you don't have a reason to know it. Would love to hear if I'm making the wrong assumption and it's something else you're talking…

Yeah that's basically it, so thanks for mentioning abbreviations! I knew they had some aliases (e.g. ls, curl) but not that it was commonplace because any powershell tutorial uses the long form and capitalizes everything (indeed I don't interact with PS a lot). It all feels very design-by-committee. Not sure whether it's a good thing that guides never use the short form: long more readable, but the specific choices of words give me weird vibes and run off blog-width line lengths. OP shows that nicely with the bash version fitting on ~60% of the line (on my screen) but the PS version running out of the line.

A lot has been written about naming things and brevity versus clarity, and while I sit very firmly on the programmer's side as opposed to the math people side (single letter variable names, in weird fonts or languages if they (surprise!) run out of available letters), I think I am more of a bash person than a java person in terms of naming things. Word-ish commands like pushd, kill, read, etc. (taking some bash built-ins here as examples, rather than external programs which may be named arbitrarily) seem a lot nicer to me than either very long commands or acronyms where you basically still have to know the long form to remember it. I'd never have guessed that spps stands for stop-process yet that's the portable powershell form of 'kill' (just looked that one up).

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#49

Post by lionkor »

I dont really see the answer to the question in the article, maybe I missed it.

You can use PowerShell on Linux. You can use vcpkg on Linux (very well, even). You can learn C++ and you wont need the `_In_` and whatnot. If you use WSL2 for your development, are you even developing (fully) on Windows?

What you can't do is really own a copy of windows (any recent one), and have the freedom to decide what tools you will use. There is nothing protecting your system from locking you out of any setting, at any point, and requiring you to buy a different key, subscribing, giving them your data, or whatever else.

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