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Reminds me of: > Here's my point: yes, the whole Internet runs on Unix philosophy. But businesses sure don't. The big problem comes up in my description of pip

Reminds me of: > Here's my point: yes, the whole Internet runs on Unix philosophy. But businesses sure don't. The big problem comes up in my description of pipelines up above: they only parse about 99% correctly, which is fine for your idiotic comments about YouTube videos, but pretty nasty when you mangle critical business data. And when the business dudes get involved, they'd rather do anything than mangle their critical business data. You hear me? Anything! > If it keeps the data from getting mangled, they'd happily sacrifice searchability. Or developer hours. Or the ability to use off-the-shelf software. Or millions of dollars in licensing fees (because at least they'll accurately know how many millions). > Pay attention, because that attitude is exactly why Windows is so strong, why the vast majority of developers prefer to develop on Windows, and why the vast majority of users prefer to use Windows. It may be gross, and adding new features or libraries may be a lot like stabbing yourself repeatedly with a fork (which, tragically, is not itself included in Win32), but Windows works consistently. So does SOAP. But not Unix or microformats or REST. > It would be awesome if someone could find a way to satisfy both camps (the Internet people and the Enterprise people) at once. Then maybe one or the other set of technologies could finally die. But I'm not counting on it. Until then, one or the other technology is effectively dead, but which one it is depends who you are. From: Novel, yes; widespread, no (2006), https://apenwarr.ca/log/20061201 https://apenwarr.ca/log/20061201

urthor 5y ago
...we fixed this, right? Good ole fellas at Red Hat yeah? And by kicking and screaming until corporate sent us some Macbooks. ...right?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dangerface 5y ago
This makes no sense to me, if business types care about their business data and thats why they use windows, why does the argument start off by pointing out that all the mission critical stuff like email and customer facing sites run on unix? Even Microsoft runs its mission critical stuff on unix. Windows isn't popular because its good at anything its popular because windows it meets the bare minimum and has a huge marketing budget unix doesn't.
- FuriouslyAdrift 5y ago
  Windows is an ecosystem, linux is an OS... that's the difference. For the most part, Windows is far far easier to configure and maintain than linux based systems (and I say this as someone who runs a large enterprise system with Windows, Fedora, Debian, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, SoNIC, Dell OS10, MacOS, Azure... etc, all mixed together).
  - pc86 5y ago
    I would love for you to come work at my company when I was told I couldn't connect my Mac to the VPN "because the network can't support OSX" which is a sentence that doesn't even begin to make sense for me.
    - oblio 5y ago
      That's regular user speak. The user won't care about intricacies, but they've heard of the words "network" and "support" and they'll understand the gist of the problem.
    - FuriouslyAdrift 5y ago
      As an admin, if company policy doesn't forbid it, I'll help make it work. Blocking Mac users for no good reason is just being lazy...
- pc86 5y ago
  "Windows" is a monolithic thing that can be referred to singularly, even across version. Unix is not. The first thing you need to decide if you want to switch to unix is "which distro," when Windows is the distro.
  - dangerface 5y ago
    What windows? Datacenter? Essentials? Standard? which one do I need? will I be missing functions I later need? The answer to all of these questions is it probably doesn't matter that much as they all do the same thing. What distro of linux / unix should you go for? FreeBSD? Fedora? Arch? It probably doesn't matter that much as they all do the same thing.
KptMarchewa 5y ago
>why the vast majority of developers prefer to develop on Windows Was that ever true?
- pc86 5y ago
  It was true then and it's true today. Certainly not in HN or at 8-person startups nobody's ever heard of, but the vast majority of developers work on boring business software in Windows.
  - michaelcampbell 5y ago
    Why is it at every tech conference you see a vast preponderance of Mac's? Are conf goers not representative?
    - eterm 5y ago
      1. They're probably not representative 2. You probably notice macs more because of their uniform branding, compared to a mish-mash of different looking other laptops. 3. Is it not enough to watch and listen to a keynote without pulling out a laptop?
      - Jtsummers 5y ago
        4. The Mac may be a "lie". 4a. Dual booted, is it running macOS, Linux, Windows, *BSD? 4b. Is it running a VM (or more than one)? 4c. Is it used as a very expensive terminal with SSH to a different *nix OS or a remote desktop system? At various times, all those have been true of mine.
    - q-big 5y ago
      > Why is it at every tech conference you see a vast preponderance of Mac's? Are conf goers not representative? The prevalence of MacBooks at tech conferences is in my experience a very US-centric thing. I rather associate ThinkPads with tech conferences.
    - torginus 5y ago
dkarl 5y ago
I get the idea, but it seems tragically misguided in some of the specifics. A lot of average developers can do REST (in the generic sense of JSON over HTTP) well. A lot of smarter-than-average people got mired in SOAP and ended up using a bunch of its features wrong and having integration nightmares with smart people in other departments or other companies who used a different subset of features wrong. The idea that SOAP's rich set of features would result in more secure, correct, and robust software compared to REST was a plausible, logical idea, but it was an idea that didn't pan out, especially for the 99% programmers who were so exhausted and behind schedule when they finally got their SOAP integration working that they couldn't bear to stop and ask themselves what further work they needed to do to reap the promised benefits. Also, the idea that enterprise Windows business programmers were more into data integrity than the UNIX "Internet" programmers runs contrary to my experience seeing those two cultures encounter each other in the 2000s. In my experience, the former took human intervention for granted to handle unexpected or even routine-but-unusual cases, and the latter understood that their job was to build systems that could operate properly without humans constantly picking data up off the floor and dusting it off. The Windows programmers I worked with were great at creating rough-and-ready GUIs to help human employees do their jobs, honestly truly great at the "make users awesome" aspect of programming, but writing software that worked well enough to run without a human operator was just something they had never had to do. They couldn't understand why you were worried about some weird case that would mangle 0.1% of records, because in their mind that was the kind of thing that an expert user fixes up in Excel every Friday before the reports run over the weekend. A customer sends a payment after we've written off their debt? Never heard of that happening, but if it does, accounts receivable can escalate to Liz and she'll figure it out. February 29th? I think they know better than to run imports on a day like that, but to be safe, we'll remind them. Those mushy "Internet" programmers inherited a legacy that was rooted in a requirement to be robust against nuclear war[1]. The mind boggling difference in ambition between surviving armageddon and "they know better than to run the software on February 29th, lol" made for a huge difference in culture and made me look up to the "Internet" programmers as intellectual role models while respecting the business-oriented Windows programmers as scrappy, context-sensitive, tactically oriented commandos. [1] I'm not sure to what extent this was real, but the belief was real.
drekipus 5y ago
> but Windows works consistently. So does SOAP. But not Unix or microformats or REST. I have no idea that windows works consistently (?!) where unix (linux) or REST (?) doesn't. I like the idea of what they're trying to get to, but sometimes it helps to cite examples. imo, LARGELY the reason that "windows=business" is from historical lock-in effects. I, as a linux developer, still get ".xsl" files on the regular, who have each gone through 4-5 different business people before me. windows is largely a "suite" of software, from OS, to Office, to even Internet Explorer. Business types often didn't (and perhaps still don't?) know what separates Word from calc.exe - it's the entire computer interface, it works, and it's what others are using. Only a big "everything-in-one-package" could hope to upset them, and even then might have a hard time doing it. I don't think I'll ever try to purposely run much windows software again, but I do give them kudos for what they've achieved and continue (for now) to achieve. but to say it works consistently!!?
- valand 5y ago
  I get the sentiment. Consistent means differently for different person. As a non power user Windows is consistent enough. Obviously not for power user who often stray from the green usage path of Windows. Sort of like comparing working on a nodejs http server project on Windows vs working on a project that extensively uses winapi.

urthor 5y ago

...we fixed this, right? Good ole fellas at Red Hat yeah? And by kicking and screaming until corporate sent us some Macbooks. ...right?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dangerface 5y ago

This makes no sense to me, if business types care about their business data and thats why they use windows, why does the argument start off by pointing out that all the mission critical stuff like email and customer facing sites run on unix? Even Microsoft runs its mission critical stuff on unix. Windows isn't popular because its good at anything its popular because windows it meets the bare minimum and has a huge marketing budget unix doesn't.

FuriouslyAdrift 5y ago
Windows is an ecosystem, linux is an OS... that's the difference. For the most part, Windows is far far easier to configure and maintain than linux based systems (and I say this as someone who runs a large enterprise system with Windows, Fedora, Debian, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, SoNIC, Dell OS10, MacOS, Azure... etc, all mixed together).
- pc86 5y ago
  I would love for you to come work at my company when I was told I couldn't connect my Mac to the VPN "because the network can't support OSX" which is a sentence that doesn't even begin to make sense for me.
  - oblio 5y ago
    That's regular user speak. The user won't care about intricacies, but they've heard of the words "network" and "support" and they'll understand the gist of the problem.
  - FuriouslyAdrift 5y ago
    As an admin, if company policy doesn't forbid it, I'll help make it work. Blocking Mac users for no good reason is just being lazy...
pc86 5y ago
"Windows" is a monolithic thing that can be referred to singularly, even across version. Unix is not. The first thing you need to decide if you want to switch to unix is "which distro," when Windows is the distro.
- dangerface 5y ago
  What windows? Datacenter? Essentials? Standard? which one do I need? will I be missing functions I later need? The answer to all of these questions is it probably doesn't matter that much as they all do the same thing. What distro of linux / unix should you go for? FreeBSD? Fedora? Arch? It probably doesn't matter that much as they all do the same thing.

KptMarchewa 5y ago

>why the vast majority of developers prefer to develop on Windows Was that ever true?

pc86 5y ago
It was true then and it's true today. Certainly not in HN or at 8-person startups nobody's ever heard of, but the vast majority of developers work on boring business software in Windows.
- michaelcampbell 5y ago
  Why is it at every tech conference you see a vast preponderance of Mac's? Are conf goers not representative?
  - eterm 5y ago
    1. They're probably not representative 2. You probably notice macs more because of their uniform branding, compared to a mish-mash of different looking other laptops. 3. Is it not enough to watch and listen to a keynote without pulling out a laptop?
    - Jtsummers 5y ago
      4. The Mac may be a "lie". 4a. Dual booted, is it running macOS, Linux, Windows, *BSD? 4b. Is it running a VM (or more than one)? 4c. Is it used as a very expensive terminal with SSH to a different *nix OS or a remote desktop system? At various times, all those have been true of mine.
  - q-big 5y ago
    > Why is it at every tech conference you see a vast preponderance of Mac's? Are conf goers not representative? The prevalence of MacBooks at tech conferences is in my experience a very US-centric thing. I rather associate ThinkPads with tech conferences.
  - torginus 5y ago

dkarl 5y ago

I get the idea, but it seems tragically misguided in some of the specifics. A lot of average developers can do REST (in the generic sense of JSON over HTTP) well. A lot of smarter-than-average people got mired in SOAP and ended up using a bunch of its features wrong and having integration nightmares with smart people in other departments or other companies who used a different subset of features wrong. The idea that SOAP's rich set of features would result in more secure, correct, and robust software compared to REST was a plausible, logical idea, but it was an idea that didn't pan out, especially for the 99% programmers who were so exhausted and behind schedule when they finally got their SOAP integration working that they couldn't bear to stop and ask themselves what further work they needed to do to reap the promised benefits. Also, the idea that enterprise Windows business programmers were more into data integrity than the UNIX "Internet" programmers runs contrary to my experience seeing those two cultures encounter each other in the 2000s. In my experience, the former took human intervention for granted to handle unexpected or even routine-but-unusual cases, and the latter understood that their job was to build systems that could operate properly without humans constantly picking data up off the floor and dusting it off. The Windows programmers I worked with were great at creating rough-and-ready GUIs to help human employees do their jobs, honestly truly great at the "make users awesome" aspect of programming, but writing software that worked well enough to run without a human operator was just something they had never had to do. They couldn't understand why you were worried about some weird case that would mangle 0.1% of records, because in their mind that was the kind of thing that an expert user fixes up in Excel every Friday before the reports run over the weekend. A customer sends a payment after we've written off their debt? Never heard of that happening, but if it does, accounts receivable can escalate to Liz and she'll figure it out. February 29th? I think they know better than to run imports on a day like that, but to be safe, we'll remind them. Those mushy "Internet" programmers inherited a legacy that was rooted in a requirement to be robust against nuclear war[1]. The mind boggling difference in ambition between surviving armageddon and "they know better than to run the software on February 29th, lol" made for a huge difference in culture and made me look up to the "Internet" programmers as intellectual role models while respecting the business-oriented Windows programmers as scrappy, context-sensitive, tactically oriented commandos. [1] I'm not sure to what extent this was real, but the belief was real.

drekipus 5y ago

> but Windows works consistently. So does SOAP. But not Unix or microformats or REST. I have no idea that windows works consistently (?!) where unix (linux) or REST (?) doesn't. I like the idea of what they're trying to get to, but sometimes it helps to cite examples. imo, LARGELY the reason that "windows=business" is from historical lock-in effects. I, as a linux developer, still get ".xsl" files on the regular, who have each gone through 4-5 different business people before me. windows is largely a "suite" of software, from OS, to Office, to even Internet Explorer. Business types often didn't (and perhaps still don't?) know what separates Word from calc.exe - it's the entire computer interface, it works, and it's what others are using. Only a big "everything-in-one-package" could hope to upset them, and even then might have a hard time doing it. I don't think I'll ever try to purposely run much windows software again, but I do give them kudos for what they've achieved and continue (for now) to achieve. but to say it works consistently!!?

valand 5y ago
I get the sentiment. Consistent means differently for different person. As a non power user Windows is consistent enough. Obviously not for power user who often stray from the green usage path of Windows. Sort of like comparing working on a nodejs http server project on Windows vs working on a project that extensively uses winapi.