Live data from Hacker News

Why I develop on Windows

blog.shortround.dev

91–100 of 187 posts

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#91

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35614190

> Microsoft plugging more ads into Windows 11 Start Menu

I mean, come on.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#92
post #49

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…

> If you use WSL2 for your development, are you even developing (fully) on Windows? Maybe it wasn't clear in the post: I dont use wsl except as a backend for docker. I use powershell, not bash > 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. Thats not something I care about

> Thats not something I care about

Well what's the point in having a debate about any of this if you've yet to experience closed source software taking something away from you?

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#93
post #70

PowerShell 7 can be installed on Linux and MacOS! Native too, not like cygwin bash. Around the same time that came out, so did WSL so I never really learned PowerShell because now it's so easy to run real bash on Windows.

> Native too, not like cygwin bash. Are you suggesting that cygwin's bash is not "native"? It isn't installed by default, obviously, but it is a native Windows executable, as are the other command-line tools generally installed with it.

cygwin has a different ABI, and does weird things for its POSIX compatibility. In that sense, it's not native.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#94
post #49

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…

This, a million times. I am not principled enough to live without closed source hardware and software. But I've experienced too many changes to tools I didn't ask for and didn't want to try to advocate that closed source is better than open source alternatives.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#95
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

FYI I tried CLion for Rust, but did not feel any improvement of experience in comparison to VS Code + Rust analyzer plugin, so I cancelled CLion. In fact, VS Code somehow felt better. I do use Rider 50/50 with big Visual Studio though. Mostly because I feel that the need to eventually switch to Linux is creeping as Windows adds more junk.

I've heard the VSCode + Rust analyzer situation has gotten really good. I think this might have been when it wasn't as solid? I'll have to check out the VSCode situation again sometime.

The one thing I don't like about Rider vs Visual Studio + ReSharper is that ReSharper has some really advanced structural/semantic searches that haven't made their way into Rider. I don't use it a ton, but being able to do queries across the AST annotated with semantic/type info is really useful if you're working on a legacy C# project that's been copy pasted fifty times--once per state (actual thing that I ended up working on)

otherwise, Rider is rad, and I have way more intellij platform bindings and such setup for them all

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#96

I actually kind of agree with the point about PowerShell but I suppose the problem is everyone is so used to bash scripts that they've forgotten how many annoying pitfalls they have and how cryptic they are to anyone not used to writing them. A lot of resistance to PoSh is just about it being something different.

IMHO if you are already fluent in bash and aren't running or administering windows machines, there's not much point to switch. And I personally think PowerShell is nicer, but like 10% not 10x, and they do the same things. If you know some bash though, googling PowerShell and the bash command has been pretty productive for my learning.

I would agree with what you say, but that's not really a flaw with PowerShell.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#97

> 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…

> some files in the repo have ":" in the filename, which is forbidden. There's a "aux.rs", also a verboten filename in Windows

You're complaining 'bout 'doze, not devs. Come on, dude!

> (some business about CRTs but not whatever I expected with (absolutely correct-thinking) Line Feeds at the end of every line of text.)

Um . . .

Look, I understand that you didn't have enough experience to handle these outsiders, but that seems like the most understandable outsider group I can imagine. (And I don't have to imaging 'doze habits - I've seen a bunch up-close!)

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#98

Microsoft has made Linux development cool again after got derailed by macOS. Nowadays you can use almost all Linux tools on Windows. They also provide Windows Terminal which is rather excellent.

> Windows Terminal which is rather excellent.

I'd go more with buggy but functional once you know its limitations.

Copy and paste is broken, tab naming and management is broken, its still pretty rough around the edges.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought we were supposed to be using `#!/usr/bin/env python3` and not `#!/bin/python3`?

Defintely, `#!/bin/python3` will not work inside venvs, I suppose.

Or any distro that doesn't put a python3 executable in /bin. Many current distros symlink /bin to /usr/bin, but not all do, and python3 would usually be in /usr/bin. POSIX only requires /usr/bin/env and /bin/sh to exist, every other path you might use in a shebang can be moved around.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#100
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…

That "very specific thing" does not imply it should be so bad as to be foreign, you could have your much more ergonomic python in the shell as well without all the bash baggage
Post reply on HN