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Why I develop on Windows

blog.shortround.dev

71–80 of 187 posts

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#71
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…

> Similar to how C# is secretly my favorite language, but it's just not well supported on Linux C# is not-so-secretly my favorite language (though Clojure is a close second) and I use it pretty often on macos/linux. IDE wise have you given Rider a try? Imo it's a totally viable Visual Studio replacement for most C# dev, though not as nice for all workflows or related tech. Worth looking at if you haven't. It's not fr…

Dude, your comments are way too good to have an empty profile. No, I did not know of Rider, but next time that I get the C# itch again, I'll definitely be looking at what I've been missing out on!

Checking it out quickly, it's from JetBrains (a good sign for software quality) and has a 30-day trial so I'd know what I'm paying for. On the downside, ~175€ is quite steep given that it's not for a commercial purpose and I am currently fine getting my programming done in pluginless Vim. And that's not a one-time payment: that's for the first year. I can't just move on for a while and come back to expect to open up a project file and it to just work :/. I think this is not going to be for me at this price point, though the 30 days trial might be a challenge mode to start and finish a project that I might otherwise never finish at all!

Edit: And I wasn't even yet talking about your comment history. Spotted two insightful comments while skimming the top level of the first page of comments (I stopped there), and that already takes me all the way back to 2015. Not saying you must post more if you don't want to but e.g. the timer tip seems to have helped a lot of people :)

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#72

From everything I've heard about Windows turning into user-hostile bloatware over the last few years, nothing in this post seems like a good enough reason to use it. Perhaps it's Stockholm syndrom, but I honestly like my Unix-y tools (bash, jq, awk) at this point Also, regarding this example { $Env:MYSQL_HOST = "MyHost.com"; $Env:MYSQL_USER = "MyUser"; java -jar myprogram.jar; } You can do the same thing in Bash with…

People were complaining that Windows was "user-hostile bloatware" as long as there's been a Windows to complain about.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#73

> 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…

You can enable case sensitivity per directory. That moves the problem to making sure any tooling they use doesn't have an issue with that though. E.g. Sublime is capable of opening something like C:\Example\file.txt instead of C:\example\file.txt but trying to open both at the same time doesn't work. Normally Sublime would put the folder path in front of the name but on Windows it assumes the folder path is not case sensitive and performs the "is this file already open" check with case insensitive logic.

The story with enabling long file paths is even sadder. Explorer doesn't support them, for example.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#74
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

100% and I never thought of that before but I can see how you'd get that impression from tutorials. The VSCode powershell extensions will also give you suggestion squigglies under all of your aliases in a saved script if they're not long-form, but I usually mix and match based on pragmatism. My use of alias vs long-form usually comes down to two sort of situations: * Ad-hoc at the shell: all aliases all the time (and…

Regarding not thinking of them as acronyms: yeah I get that. I was wondering how to best phrase that sentence because, indeed, curl also does not stand for C Uniform Resource Locator in my head, or grep for global regular expression perl-style (if I'm remembering that one correctly). It's just curl and grep. However, whereas curl and grep are really treated as names, spps I can currently regurgitate only by thinking of stop-process, and I imagine most such abbreviations will be like that for a while.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#75

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.

I can see where you're coming from, but to me it's not some meme or joke. I find it similarly annoying in Java, for example, and it makes me want to use that language less. Obviously it's only a small part of the whole consideration.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#76
post #48

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…

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 o…

I think this kinda shows the issue, and why I personally prefer ps (as someone who's bounced off bash and NEVER gotten the time to get decent at it, and who rarely needs to use any of these and never at any serious level, so massive grain of salt).

Kill is intuitive to you because you've probably been around tech your whole life, and tech has just used "kill" ever since. It's essentially as ubiquitous as "bug".

That said, if I had to teach someone brand new with next to no skills (the endless goal of making coding easier for the average person and so on), Stop-Process is a hell of a lot easier to teach, or rather, it's much easier to teach them to help themselves.

Since it follows the same naming template as every other powershell command, if you teach them how to use the basic commands like Get-Help/Get-Command, they're a hell of a lot more likely to figure it out themselves without needing assistance. You know that every cmdlet is verb-noun, and you know you're trying to stop a process, so something like

> Get-Command "*process*"

Gives you a short list that is extremely intuitive to figure out.

Now...for something as simple as "kill" you're not expecting a beginner to run a command with a wildcard search. You'll just tell them. But that entire philosophy is extremely helpful when you're in a situation where you do need to figure out the command and don't have the ability to just spend however many minutes on google, and if you teach PS right you get to a point where it's very easy to teach yourself.

Obviously how much this matters in a world of IDE's and search engines and now AI is questionable, but I think that if you redid bash today, it'd follow similar philosophies. Things like touch, grep, and arguably even echo really strike me as "favorites" just because of the inertia/ubiquity.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#77
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Similar to how C# is secretly my favorite language, but it's just not well supported on Linux C# is not-so-secretly my favorite language (though Clojure is a close second) and I use it pretty often on macos/linux. IDE wise have you given Rider a try? Imo it's a totally viable Visual Studio replacement for most C# dev, though not as nice for all workflows or related tech. Worth looking at if you haven't. It's not fr…

Dude, your comments are way too good to have an empty profile. No, I did not know of Rider, but next time that I get the C# itch again, I'll definitely be looking at what I've been missing out on! Checking it out quickly, it's from JetBrains (a good sign for software quality) and has a 30-day trial so I'd know what I'm paying for. On the downside, ~175€ is quite steep given that it's not for a commercial purpose and…

> Dude, your comments are way too good to have an empty profile

Thanks! I really appreciate that. Been kind of a bummer year so it's nice to hear (#layoff problems, so I'm definitely not the only one, and I think that's looking up recently)

I don't think I'd get Rider by itself, either. I was doing consulting for awhile and ended up getting the jetbrains all product thing personally because was jumping between Goland, Rider, Webstorm, and Rubymine, and Datagrip a lot (I honestly don't remember which are paid now). I got it personally because I ended up using it so much. I ended up using CLion (which is paid) for learning Rust, too, which was nice.

definitely check out the 30 day trial. And 100% JetBrains knows what they're doing

Have to dip, but feel free to ask whatever questions and I'll check it out when I get back. No pressure either way.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#78
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…

Yeah he says because you have to update bash he prefers using WSL2. As if you don't have to install that???

I think you misread. I dont prefer WSL2, I rarely use it directly. I prefer powershell

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After 3 decades working on Windows, I recently got into Linux and stared learning bash through "The Linux Command Line, 5th ed." book and watching youtube videos. Powershell is so much nicer and a lot more productive to work with compared to bash. Unlike the bash commands that returns strings, Powershell commands return objects. Working in any OOP language and Powershell feels very natural.

What’s the dirs -v, pushd and popd equivalent in PS?

What do those do

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#80
post #13
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…

>A lot of people coming from the Unix-like world of macOS and Linux don't tend to know [PS]

We all have different experiences of life but I have never found this to be the case. Linux users are savvy and curious about things even outside their bubble.

The only people I can imagine this being true for is the true greybeards who have been daily driving Linux for 20 years.

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