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Why I develop on Windows

blog.shortround.dev

101–110 of 187 posts

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#101

> 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…

One of those examples when religious backwards compatibility poisons the future for a much bigger user base

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#102
I'm a battle-scarred Windows developer (more by chance than by choice, mind you) and even I find Powershell exceptionally annoying.

The commands are verbose and the syntax is non-standard in a way that, quite frankly, is unnecessarily and exceptionally annoying.

But the worst thing is some super confusing aspect of how scopes for variables etc work.. which I've somehow forgotten already because the last few times I needed to write something in PS I straight-up got ChatGPT to do the legwork.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#103
post #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.

Interested in copy/paste stuff - mind adding details? I use it very often and works for me.

For tabs I don't care much as not using them.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#104
post #5

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

Aaand I probably don't remember last time I needed to set version explicitly, it's usually just a single version of everything, mind sharing your case?

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#105
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…

> > even putting #!/bin/python3 at the head of a script so that it runs through the shell. Uh, not, in that case the shell is not involved at all. The kernel implements shebang and will automatically start the interpreter, whatever it is, without having to go through the shell.

so, a typical noob. Even though he claims he shined in the operating systems course.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#106
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…

Often mentioned failing of powershell commands is that they went with Verb-Noun, when the reverse would have been much more discoverable. You want to specify what you want to operate on first, Get- will be much less useful then Process-.

Otherwise, despite their length I do like these long names, you can have aliases for ‘ls’ and alia, and flags fuzzy match.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#107
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…

The convention is to use the short form whenever you are in a terminal for one-off commands, but go for the full name for script files that has to be maintained/read later — which is an absolutely sane policy in my opinion.

Bash is a write-only-full-of-bugs language, comparatively.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#108

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.

It doesn't bring anything new to the discussion, but if it is the reason people don't use it, then it is relevant.

I don't use it, because I was Mac/Linux at home and Linux at work for so long - only now do I have a reason to.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#109
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…

Just to clarify: when you buy you get a license for the current version that is yours to keep and then you get updates through the year, so you can drop back and use an older version if you don't want to keep paying.

Mind you I had the all products pack for a while now, so YMMV.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Only if you use osx… on linux there is no need to do such a strange thing.
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