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Why I develop on Windows

blog.shortround.dev

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Re: Why I develop on Windows

#151

Post by cyberbanjo »

peteri wrote: post #129
cyberbanjo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to corroborate from the opposite direction, I have run exclusively Linux on my personal machines for nearly a decade, and I started a new job where I get to use PowerShell, and it's really amazing, the amount of grep/tail/head (or Get-ChildItem/Select -First/-Last) I have to do is so much less, it feels so much less klunky. Probably the only thing I don't like more so far is Get-Help, because it doesnt put you i…

I thought the PSReadline module had some of that but then it might be a "nearly" compatible experience which can be really jarring when you hit the edge cases.

Maybe I just didn't have enabled, thanks for reminding me, seems good enough for me

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#152

Post by bombolo »

cryptonector wrote: post #144
bombolo wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My son shined in that course, but I'd be surprised if he knew this particular bit of trivia.

so they didn't learn about fork/exec in that course? I don't believe it wasn't mentioned :)

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#153

Post by franga2000 »

justeleblanc wrote: post #128
overthrow wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is true. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40794287/cannot-write-to... https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/img_5be...

Look, I just created a file named "aux.rs" on my Windows machine. It's not true.

I've seen this plenty of times, but maybe if was fixed in the last year or so. My issue was when trying to delete a Linux source tree that was git cloned on Linux onto a flash drive. Maybe the filesystem had something to do with it, but it was entirely impossible to delete it using any tool I know of in Windows.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#154

Post by shortrounddev »

bombolo wrote: post #152
cryptonector wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My son shined in that course, but I'd be surprised if he knew this particular bit of trivia.

so they didn't learn about fork/exec in that course? I don't believe it wasn't mentioned :)

OS class is not about Linux, its about OS theory. You learn the algorithms for priority queues and preempting tasks and even build a simple OS (depending on the class). Very little of it is about how IRL operating systems/kernels like NT or Linux work, though they did use some examples to demonstrate. Forking was more in Systems programming class, but that class was more about C, system calls, linking, and gdb. Not much time was dedicated to the syntax of shell scripts.

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#155

Post by shortrounddev »

minimaul wrote: post #120
AaronFriel wrote: post #21

I've followed a different path, but I've come to the same conclusion. Along my path, picking up languages like Haskell or Node early on meant using Linux. So since high school I've always had _a_ Linux machine available, but preferred to use Windows as the user interface. Two thing I can say for any naysayers who use a Mac and do devops, backend development etc.: 1. Are you sure your environment that matches your dep…

> 1. Are you sure your environment that matches your deployment environment? Do you have confidence your server code runs the same on an Apple Silicon Mac as the (very likely) x86-64 and Linux environment your users use? I’d argue that a lot of us are developing SaaS etc and the browser is our main touch point, so this isn’t necessarily as relevant.

I often run into the issue of forgetting to set node affinity in my deployments and my x86 backend not running on an ARM server we have for some reason (nothing we do requires ARM, so idk why we have those nodes)

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#156

Post by shortrounddev »

stemlord wrote: post #148

A lot of praise for the "little known" (???) Path variable in windows. But dealing with windows path really sucks for one major reason: there's a shockingly low character limit [0] Also idk if this is a problem for anyone else, but since admin privs are required to add to path, I need to fetch IT every time I need to add to it on my work machine, lol. [0] https://superuser.com/questions/1385854/how-do-i-bypass-rest..…

The PATH variable in windows has a low character limit but if your path is properly set up as a REG_EXPAND_SZ, then you can just add more and more variables to it and I dont think the expanded version counts toward the character limit. One reason you shouldn't save your path variable changes from your terminal is that it implicitly converts to REG_SZ on save

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#157

Post by shortrounddev »

tomjen3 wrote: post #115
sys_64738 wrote: post #90

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.

Microsoft made win dev tolerable by including Linux. To properly work with git I installed gitbash -- that is essentially Linux in a box, complete with git, ssh and the basic bash tools like cat. To do more complicated things, you can install WSL, which is literally a virtual machine running Linux, well integrated with the Windows system. The problem of course is that well-integrated is not the same as native, but MS…

Git exists on windows without git bash. Just run `choco install git` and i recommend `choco install poshgit` too for some helpful terminal hints like current branch

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#158

Post by shortrounddev »

bombolo wrote: post #146
shortrounddev wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't really an argument against what I said. You can pick and choose your shell language based on preference for syntax. You generally learn a human language because you have to for one reason or another. I think bash has an unintuitive syntax, and I think powershell's is more readable

If languages were intuitive, it wouldn't take years to learn them.

Okay? Are we still talking about preferred shells or are we talking about chinese

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#159

Post by shortrounddev »

subjectsigma wrote: post #133

I have no idea what the point of this article is. It just seemed like rambling. Are you trying to get us to switch to Windows? To shame macOS into a better dev experience? To justify your own decisions to yourself?

I wrote it after reading several articles on Microsoft's docs page which are all stories of developers moving from Mac to Windows. All of those stories boiled down to: "WSL makes it easier to have the same development workflow on the PC as on a mac". I felt this was short-changing a lot of the other features of windows that I like and wanted to point those out and make the point that windows is, I believe, a good development platform even without WSL.

Also, many people here are saying "yes, I know all about powershell and the terminal and path variables, this is all obvious", but my experience IRL with developers who use macbooks is that they haven't touched windows since maybe 7 and literally did not know anything about the various features here. So if the information here is unconvincing, thats fine. If its not news to you, then you're probably not the kind of person I'm talking about

Addi

Re: Why I develop on Windows

#160

Post by shortrounddev »

chaxor wrote: post #7
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! :)

Its not as popular to distribute projects as source on windows, but ive personally built a dozen or so libs and dependencies from cmake into msbuild/visual studio SLN files, so it actually does happen because I've found that Linux devs don't tend to distribute precompiled binaries at all. I think this trend it changing now though because I see a lot of github projects releasing binaries for a lot of different platforms in the releases section.
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