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In my previous job, we had some bash scripts for a lot of things. It worked pretty well among Linux and Mac users in the team, but one day we had a new develope

by stymaar 10y ago

In my previous job, we had some bash scripts for a lot of things. It worked pretty well among Linux and Mac users in the team, but one day we had a new developer who was a windows user … We rewritten all those scripts in JavaScript using Grunt. Maybe nowaday it's different thanks to Windows subsystem for Linux.

bigato 10y ago
Wouldn't it be better for one developer to learn and adapt to the rest of the team? I don't get why all the rest had to adapt to this single person who didn't know shell.
- Klathmon 10y ago
  There's a benefit to having multiple platforms on your development team if you are developing something for multiple platforms. It's too often I see projects with "supports Linux, OSX, and Windows" only to find that none of the maintainers actually own a Mac and therefore it is filled with bugs and often requires the user to "find their own dependencies". If we are talking days of time and not weeks, the benefits of making (and keeping) your whole system cross platform could pay off big time in the future when you or someone on your team wants to switch, or you just want to easily test on other platforms.
  - stymaar 10y ago
    Exactly: Having a developer working on windows was a blessing since it allowed someone in the team to test on EI11 before we shipped to the product team, and it really improved our reactivity on this plateform. It wasn't our main target since our product was using webRtc(i.e. Firefox and Chrome), but it was supposed to fail gracefully on IE.
    - nawitus 10y ago
      At least these days you can download VirtualBox images for free to test on IE11. But yeah, it's a luxury if there's a Windows developer that you can have fixing all the IE11 bugs ;).
      - jimmaswell 10y ago
        I was under the impression that IE was standards compliant enough by version 11 that this shouldn't be necessary, but I guess not.
        path411 10y ago
        Well, it's pretty complaint to standards now. The problem is that it's just 2-3 year old standards.
kbutler 10y ago
Cygwin or msys2 would probably have let that dev run the build scripts.
dorfsmay 10y ago
Asking that new dev to install cygwin might have been easier!
laumars 10y ago
There's plenty of other POSIX userlands for Windows before WSL (cygwin, Ming). There are also plenty of other cross platform programming environments before Grunt (Perl, Python, Ruby, Lua, Haskell, numerous lisps, etc). JavaScript isn't unique. It's not even the best at what it does. It just has a monopoly in the browser so people latched on to it.
pjmlp 10y ago
As if JavaScript would be the only option.
battlebot 10y ago
You should have tried Python. At one job, we used Groovy for that--we had AIX boxes, some Linux, and Windows and all our scripts ran fine everywhere albeit there were JVMs that had to exist and be on the path.

by stymaar 10y ago

bigato 10y ago

Wouldn't it be better for one developer to learn and adapt to the rest of the team? I don't get why all the rest had to adapt to this single person who didn't know shell.

Klathmon 10y ago
There's a benefit to having multiple platforms on your development team if you are developing something for multiple platforms. It's too often I see projects with "supports Linux, OSX, and Windows" only to find that none of the maintainers actually own a Mac and therefore it is filled with bugs and often requires the user to "find their own dependencies". If we are talking days of time and not weeks, the benefits of making (and keeping) your whole system cross platform could pay off big time in the future when you or someone on your team wants to switch, or you just want to easily test on other platforms.
- stymaar 10y ago
  Exactly: Having a developer working on windows was a blessing since it allowed someone in the team to test on EI11 before we shipped to the product team, and it really improved our reactivity on this plateform. It wasn't our main target since our product was using webRtc(i.e. Firefox and Chrome), but it was supposed to fail gracefully on IE.
  - nawitus 10y ago
    At least these days you can download VirtualBox images for free to test on IE11. But yeah, it's a luxury if there's a Windows developer that you can have fixing all the IE11 bugs ;).
    - jimmaswell 10y ago
      I was under the impression that IE was standards compliant enough by version 11 that this shouldn't be necessary, but I guess not.
      - path411 10y ago
        Well, it's pretty complaint to standards now. The problem is that it's just 2-3 year old standards.

kbutler 10y ago

Cygwin or msys2 would probably have let that dev run the build scripts.

dorfsmay 10y ago

Asking that new dev to install cygwin might have been easier!

laumars 10y ago

There's plenty of other POSIX userlands for Windows before WSL (cygwin, Ming). There are also plenty of other cross platform programming environments before Grunt (Perl, Python, Ruby, Lua, Haskell, numerous lisps, etc). JavaScript isn't unique. It's not even the best at what it does. It just has a monopoly in the browser so people latched on to it.

pjmlp 10y ago

As if JavaScript would be the only option.

battlebot 10y ago

You should have tried Python. At one job, we used Groovy for that--we had AIX boxes, some Linux, and Windows and all our scripts ran fine everywhere albeit there were JVMs that had to exist and be on the path.