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Unix you layer a major role in the success of the Mac in two key markets. First max was the cool box for young developers, since it provided a Unix dev environ
by bodhiandphysics 4y ago
Unix you layer a major role in the success of the Mac in two key markets. First max was the cool box for young developers, since it provided a Unix dev environment and this such nice things as Python, ruby, reasonable c++, git, etc. when these often worked poorly on windows.
2) while emgineering software moved from Unix to windows in the early 2000s, scientific software often did not. It was however available on macs. The result is that macs took over university science departments.
Now both of these are irrelevant because of virtualization, wsl, and better windows support. But it was once a really big deal. Mac was a Unix environment that also had word and PowerPoint.
- pjmlp 4y agoOnly when one equates "developers === UNIX", which is why so many still don't get Apple developer's culture, even with two decades of OS X. C++ on the Mac was already a great development experience with Toolbox and Metrowerks PowerPlant. Copland was going to be fully based on C++. If you look close enough to NeXT's history and how Steve Jobs thought about UNIX beards, NeXT only supported UNIX as means to compete against Sun on the workstation market. His reluctant appearance at USENIX is well documented. Everything was supposed to be coded with Objective-C frameworks, down to the device drivers. If anything those "developers" are now finding out that they should have been giving money to Linux OEMs instead. While Microsoft discovered that that group doesn't really care about Linux per se, only having POSIX toys around, and given that Linux compatibility nowadays matters more than POSIX (even other UNIXes have Linux compatibility layers), they decided to reboot SUA with WSL.
- bodhiandphysics 4y agoI’m sure mac was a wonderful dev environment for developing Mac GUI apps. But was it a wonderful dev environment for developing high performance numerical code? Or web servers? Or robotics? Or... Most developers don’t write GUI apps.
- pjmlp 4y agoPlenty of developers always wrote applications for the Mac platform. As for numerical software, Mathematica and Matlab always had a place on the Mac. What is about all that craziness to equate "developer" with UNIX?
- bodhiandphysics 4y agoMatlab is a useful tool. But you don’t write a fem silver in matlab! And matlab came to the Mac only after the switch to Unix.