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I really wish I could show about 70% of the Windows knuckleheads a few Linux tools. And I really wish about half of Hacker News would spend twenty minutes with

by tacos 11y ago

I really wish I could show about 70% of the Windows knuckleheads a few Linux tools. And I really wish about half of Hacker News would spend twenty minutes with Visual Studio and Azure. Both sides have no idea what is possible. And, no. No joke.

edgyswingset 11y ago
I see it as a problem with people not being open to a shift in how to get things done. You even see it within Windows development, like the crowd who argue you can't get anything done without ReSharper. People get used to doing something one way, and any other way is seen as inferior.
miguelrochefort 11y ago
Show me the Linux tools.
- tacos 11y ago
  This will get buried here and is worthy of a separate thread. But... what are the "gateway drugs" for a Windows-centric dev? A Linux-centrix dev? For me it was Postgres to show what open source was really capable of (a more current example would be LLVM), and Python and SWIG as examples of things that simply don't exist inside the Microsoft ecosystem but which solve so, so many problems. And even on weeks where I'm sitting in Visual Studio all day, I still couldn't live without Cygwin, wonky as it may be. Also: your fears about licensing and quality and some of the other FUD I see in threads like this are largely bullshit. On the other side, any Mac or Linux dev who prefers Eclipse or Xcode to Visual Studio really needs to have his or her head examined. There's a culture shock, yes. Now give it a few days and deal with it. C# is superior to Java -- much smarter language architects and bigger, better teams, better tech, better docs. F# type providers will make your head explode in a positive way. Azure kicks ass on AWS, sorry. And the sheer depth and volume of everything Microsoft does really can't be understood until you dig in. This is a company that spends $10 billion every year on R&D. And they're the most developer-focused company on earth by far. Also, they're actually not stupid, though you may have to take that on faith to start. There is also PLENTY of open source code. Also plenty of "pay $149 for something with support instead of beating your head against a bunch of snarky bastards on a mailing list for a week" options too for those moments when you have more money than time. Also: all your fears about lock-in and secret API and some of the other FUD I see here are largely bullshit, too.
aeturnum 11y ago
I think the number of people who have used both is quite large. The people who know the ups and downs of both systems just don't post that the other system has bad tools, so they're not in the conversation.
blackbeard 11y ago
I use both. The friction is way lower on the Linux side of things. Sure you can knock up a 50 line powershell script to thing X but if you do it in 97 lines of python it takes less time because you didn't have to download a later version of management tooling which then required a reboot followed by half an hour arguing with script signing followed by an hour of trying to scan through KB articles to work out why your PS script didn't run in task scheduler only to find it was an obscure compatibility flag followed by it failing after two days because a CIFS share suddenly went offline... And today visual studio 2013 crashed on me a relatively low 11 times... Oh and I had to fix a script that tried to deploy sql server instances and pretty much entirely fucked up my workstation. This is every day when your product gets large.
- tacos 11y ago
  Visual Studio should not be crashing. Also bash scripts are famous for fucking up server instances, too. And crond, while simple, is equally deadly. Everyone's had a weird ass permissions problem there that took three nights of logs to figure out. This is general life in the trenches regardless of platform. Also, I'm certainly not a PowerShell fan but you have to admit it does bring structure to the madness.
dougmany 11y ago
I use Visual studio to write c# apps for my day job(love it). My Linux development had been polar opposites of spending days getting a embedded arm toolchain to compile and using vim to make a .c file an typing gcc main.c -o HelloWorld. There is also the whole make file strangeness. Where would you point me to make me like linux development more?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- blackbeard 11y ago
  Use python or go instead.
- joezydeco 11y ago
  I'd recommend Yocto to build a system and toolchain for your target, but it's insanely painful to do anything beyond building a precooked recipe for a known embedded target. Installing an ARM toolchain is simple now. Don't build one unless you really need to (or you install Yocto). apt-get install gcc-arm-linux-gnueabi
  - david-given 11y ago
    There's a page on my website called 'A short guide to building a gcc cross-compiler (while still remaining nominally insane)'. It's hopelessly out-of-date now, but it's still one of the most popular pages I've got. Back when I wrote it, in the gcc 4.3.3 days, I don't even think gcc had a release manager --- we're talking clean, out-of-the-box build failures here. It's gotten a bit better since then, but getting hold of a gcc cross-compiler is still painfully, pointlessly hard.
    - joezydeco 11y ago
      It's gotten a bit better since then, but getting hold of a gcc cross-compiler is still painfully, pointlessly hard For ARM it takes 90 seconds in Debian/Ubuntu. I posted the command right above. And the larger chipmakers will provide or point you to relevant toolsets or include them with their IDEs. Even the large independent IDE makers wrap their stuff around gcc now.
kyberias 11y ago
Show the Linux tools. I'm genuinely interested.

by tacos 11y ago

edgyswingset 11y ago

I see it as a problem with people not being open to a shift in how to get things done. You even see it within Windows development, like the crowd who argue you can't get anything done without ReSharper. People get used to doing something one way, and any other way is seen as inferior.

miguelrochefort 11y ago

Show me the Linux tools.

tacos 11y ago
This will get buried here and is worthy of a separate thread. But... what are the "gateway drugs" for a Windows-centric dev? A Linux-centrix dev? For me it was Postgres to show what open source was really capable of (a more current example would be LLVM), and Python and SWIG as examples of things that simply don't exist inside the Microsoft ecosystem but which solve so, so many problems. And even on weeks where I'm sitting in Visual Studio all day, I still couldn't live without Cygwin, wonky as it may be. Also: your fears about licensing and quality and some of the other FUD I see in threads like this are largely bullshit. On the other side, any Mac or Linux dev who prefers Eclipse or Xcode to Visual Studio really needs to have his or her head examined. There's a culture shock, yes. Now give it a few days and deal with it. C# is superior to Java -- much smarter language architects and bigger, better teams, better tech, better docs. F# type providers will make your head explode in a positive way. Azure kicks ass on AWS, sorry. And the sheer depth and volume of everything Microsoft does really can't be understood until you dig in. This is a company that spends $10 billion every year on R&D. And they're the most developer-focused company on earth by far. Also, they're actually not stupid, though you may have to take that on faith to start. There is also PLENTY of open source code. Also plenty of "pay $149 for something with support instead of beating your head against a bunch of snarky bastards on a mailing list for a week" options too for those moments when you have more money than time. Also: all your fears about lock-in and secret API and some of the other FUD I see here are largely bullshit, too.

aeturnum 11y ago

I think the number of people who have used both is quite large. The people who know the ups and downs of both systems just don't post that the other system has bad tools, so they're not in the conversation.

blackbeard 11y ago

I use both. The friction is way lower on the Linux side of things. Sure you can knock up a 50 line powershell script to thing X but if you do it in 97 lines of python it takes less time because you didn't have to download a later version of management tooling which then required a reboot followed by half an hour arguing with script signing followed by an hour of trying to scan through KB articles to work out why your PS script didn't run in task scheduler only to find it was an obscure compatibility flag followed by it failing after two days because a CIFS share suddenly went offline... And today visual studio 2013 crashed on me a relatively low 11 times... Oh and I had to fix a script that tried to deploy sql server instances and pretty much entirely fucked up my workstation. This is every day when your product gets large.

tacos 11y ago
Visual Studio should not be crashing. Also bash scripts are famous for fucking up server instances, too. And crond, while simple, is equally deadly. Everyone's had a weird ass permissions problem there that took three nights of logs to figure out. This is general life in the trenches regardless of platform. Also, I'm certainly not a PowerShell fan but you have to admit it does bring structure to the madness.

dougmany 11y ago

I use Visual studio to write c# apps for my day job(love it). My Linux development had been polar opposites of spending days getting a embedded arm toolchain to compile and using vim to make a .c file an typing gcc main.c -o HelloWorld. There is also the whole make file strangeness. Where would you point me to make me like linux development more?

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
blackbeard 11y ago
Use python or go instead.
joezydeco 11y ago
I'd recommend Yocto to build a system and toolchain for your target, but it's insanely painful to do anything beyond building a precooked recipe for a known embedded target. Installing an ARM toolchain is simple now. Don't build one unless you really need to (or you install Yocto). apt-get install gcc-arm-linux-gnueabi
- david-given 11y ago
  There's a page on my website called 'A short guide to building a gcc cross-compiler (while still remaining nominally insane)'. It's hopelessly out-of-date now, but it's still one of the most popular pages I've got. Back when I wrote it, in the gcc 4.3.3 days, I don't even think gcc had a release manager --- we're talking clean, out-of-the-box build failures here. It's gotten a bit better since then, but getting hold of a gcc cross-compiler is still painfully, pointlessly hard.
  - joezydeco 11y ago
    It's gotten a bit better since then, but getting hold of a gcc cross-compiler is still painfully, pointlessly hard For ARM it takes 90 seconds in Debian/Ubuntu. I posted the command right above. And the larger chipmakers will provide or point you to relevant toolsets or include them with their IDEs. Even the large independent IDE makers wrap their stuff around gcc now.

kyberias 11y ago

Show the Linux tools. I'm genuinely interested.