6 ms·

The one point I really disagree on is Linux. Sure learning Linux will most likely teach you something about the platform on which anything you write will proba

by cletus 15y ago

The one point I really disagree on is Linux. Sure learning Linux will most likely teach you something about the platform on which anything you write will probably be deployed but that's really marginal (IMHO). You get things done (programming included) by getting all the roadblocks out of your way. Linux is (IMHO) a roadblock. The OP claims it teaches you researching skills by giving you problems everyday you need to find solutions for. This is true in the same way that refusing to buy food of any kind teaches self-sufficiency. To get things done you need to get in the zone. This means eliminating distractions. Trying to figure out why copy and paste doesn't work (and it turns out that it's because you're using OpenJDK instead of the Sun JDK) very much takes you out of that zone and then wastes time to boot. This might be more useful later on (maybe) but learning to programming? No way. To me, the best development platform is OSX. Why? Because it's (BSD) UNIX that is a pleasure to use that (mostly) doesn't have the aforementioned problems. My only real beef is that if you're used to using a program on Linux or Windows the keyboard shortcuts will generally be different on OSX (due to following the OSX conventions). And as much as people (myself included) like to rag on Windows (in my case: the complexity), the fact is that modern Windows (Win7) is actually a pretty pleasant experience. Some things (eg git) suck but Cygwin can ameliorate a lot of those problems.

wazoox 15y ago
I'd say that the main advantage of Linux here is that it helps get you started; it's really easy to make a quick CLI tool, usually in the form of a shell, perl or python script, that is useful -- scratching an itch. This applies quite well to Mac OS, of course, but to run Mac OS you'll need a Mac...
- recursive 15y ago
  You can also write python and powershell scripts in windows.
  - wazoox 15y ago
    Of course, but from my experience opening a CLI is completely unnatural to Windows users, much more than even Mac users.
    - recursive 15y ago
      And most Windows aren't developers. The fact that linux has a CLI isn't a particularly compelling reason not to use Windows though, since Windows also does.
      - kragen 15y ago
        You are not seriously comparing CMD.EXE with gnome-terminal and bash, are you? Come on.
      - wazoox 15y ago
        It's a cultural difference and nothing more. On Linux, opening a CLI is something natural and common, something that every user does at times. Hence writing a quick CLI script seems more natural than on windows.
spacemanaki 15y ago
For someone who already has a Windows machine (still the majority, I believe) you just replaced one roadblock with another. One is technical and the other is financial (buying a Mac). Really, Norvig sums this up best: "When asked "what operating system should I use, Windows, Unix, or Mac?", my answer is usually: "use whatever your friends use." " (I use a Mac and think it's swell, but I definitely couldn't have shelled out for one as a high schooler learning to program, but could burn a weekend dual booting Linux)
- fl3tch 15y ago
  > you just replaced one roadblock with another. One is technical and the other is financial (buying a Mac) I think you hit on an important point. Most people seem to be approaching this from an adult / professional perspective. I'm thinking of the bright 14-year-old kid who wants to learn about computers. He (or his parents) may not be able to afford a $2000 Macbook, but he could build his own box relatively cheaply and put a free operating system on it. Linux is democratizing that way. And he can download the source code to virtually everything running on that box. That has undoubtedly inspired a few programmers.
  - pm90 15y ago
    I fully agree, since I am one such programmer. You cannot imagine how beneficial Linux has been in making it possible for students from countries like India to learn deeply and experiment with their systems.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
ImprovedSilence 15y ago
I didn't start to really understand how things all work and go together until I installed Linux on my desktop, and started exploring that world. I don't disagree with using OSX, in fact I use a Mac to do all my work now. But I never got started or interested or developed an understanding until I started using linux. Linux almost forces you to learn the underworkings of your system, computing in general, and loves to make you do work in the terminal. All good for learning programming. I used to have a jokes tab on my iGoogle page, one day the joke of the day was: "If you want you computer to work, use a mac, if you want to know how you computer works, use linux, and if you don't want to know why your computer doesn't work, use windows." I thought it was funny, and it was a step in my inspiration to use Linux. One analogy I'll make to promote learning on Linux: When I started playing guitar, any experienced player or teacher will tell you to learn on an acoustic guitar. Why? It's more challenging to make it sound good, you have to press harder on the strings, The strings are further away from the frets, you get buzz and damping if you don't use just the right form. It teaches you to over learn, then when you switch to an electric, it's easy peasy, and just sounds sooo good. I think in this case you could consider Linux to be the acoustic guitar, and Mac to be an electric. Just my two cents.
- stepeight 15y ago
  "I think in this case you could consider Linux to be the acoustic guitar, and Mac to be an electric." Does this make Windows the double-necked bass?
  - zecho 15y ago
    Keytar.
kragen 15y ago
To my taste, Linux puts a lot less roadblocks in my way than MacOS does. Maybe my complaints that follow are simply due to my ignorance, in which case I hope you will take the time to correct me, but as far as I know they're real roadblocks. I want to see the source to the ls command? dpkg -S /bin/ls; apt-get source coreutils. I have no idea how to do that on MacOS. I want to be able to compile it? apt-get build-dep coreutils, which IIRC will install the compiler. The equivalent on MacOS involves signing up for a developer account with Apple, signing a contract that promises God knows what, and downloading a multi-gigabyte disk image. Even after installing, gcc still isn't in your PATH, and won't work properly with the platform SDK without a verbose -isysroot option. I want to make executable the file named gooba somewhere under my current directory? chmod +x $(find -name gooba). Apple's find requires an explicit `.` and maybe an explicit `-print`, I don't remember. Got performance problems on your machine? On Linux you have htop, dstat, iotop, powertop, and latencytop, none of which have MacOS equivalents as far as I know. Even plain old top has keystroke commands to switch between sorting by CPU and sorting by resident set size. As far as I can tell, doing that on MacOS requires restarting top with different command-line options. And there's no package-management system, so if you're building a server-based app, good luck installing the same versions of the same libraries on the server that you tested against in development. Or on your new dev box. And the server's probably running Linux anyway. Also, where the fuck is strace? Dtruss is a fucking piece of shit. Admittedly XCode is a pretty nice IDE, but there are a lot of nice IDEs out there, and most of them run on Linux too. And I'd love to have dtrace on Linux.
- jorgecastillo 15y ago
  http://opensource.apple.com/ http://opensource.apple.com/
  - kragen 15y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean by that. Maybe you're trying to say that, yes, there are a hell of a lot of serious roadblocks?
    - 0x09 15y ago
SkyMarshal 15y ago
Fwiw, in my own experience, I learned more about how computers and computing work from the first year of exclusively using Linux than from a decade of using Windows. Windows is designed from scratch to hide all that and abstract it into a GUI. Linux both forces you to figure stuff out, and enables you to, which in my case also motivated me to. I don't know how that would have worked out had I been using OS X instead of Linux though, maybe the same since it's BSD-based. But I suspect Linux may be the only one where you can feel full ownership over your own system, and can be motivated by the knowledge that if you take the time and effort to figure it out, you can make it do anything you want to. That personal, emotional investment I believe is the most important, rewarding, and incentivizing aspect of learning computers, computing, programming, and/or CS.
- pasbesoin 15y ago
  Windows is also designed to make you start paying to get at details. And keep paying. If you are e.g. a youngster, or a "this should be automated" worker who doesn't have any tech budget, this can be a significant hindrance. (Yes, I know there are now various MS initiatives such as the Express Studios and Spark whatnot. There didn't used to be (I wonder what changed ;-), and I remain skeptical.)
larsberg 15y ago
It's funny that you mention the keyboard shortcuts! When I talk to old hackers on Linux about moving to OSX, I tell them, "well, if you move, you don't have to configure your power management and display drivers and it has Emacs keybindings in all the windows!" and they get excited. When I talk to young CS undergraduates --- all of whom have Macs, because it's not an engineering college --- I tell them, "you should learn Emacs; I know it's in a terminal, but it has all of the OSX keybindings you already started to learn!" and they get excited.
rbanffy 15y ago
I think Linux is a much richer development environment than OSX and much easier to manage through package managers like apt or yum. Sorry, but nothing on OSX comes close. Plus, you get an insanely rich collection of interpreters, compilers and assorted tools and it runs on just about any computer you already have. Cygwin can make life under Windows bearable, but there is a long list of confusing things people have to deal with such as the /cygdrive tree and executables always having the .exe extension. "ls" autocompleting to "ls.exe"?

by cletus 15y ago

wazoox 15y ago

I'd say that the main advantage of Linux here is that it helps get you started; it's really easy to make a quick CLI tool, usually in the form of a shell, perl or python script, that is useful -- scratching an itch. This applies quite well to Mac OS, of course, but to run Mac OS you'll need a Mac...

recursive 15y ago
You can also write python and powershell scripts in windows.
- wazoox 15y ago
  Of course, but from my experience opening a CLI is completely unnatural to Windows users, much more than even Mac users.
  - recursive 15y ago
    And most Windows aren't developers. The fact that linux has a CLI isn't a particularly compelling reason not to use Windows though, since Windows also does.
    - kragen 15y ago
      You are not seriously comparing CMD.EXE with gnome-terminal and bash, are you? Come on.
    - wazoox 15y ago
      It's a cultural difference and nothing more. On Linux, opening a CLI is something natural and common, something that every user does at times. Hence writing a quick CLI script seems more natural than on windows.

spacemanaki 15y ago

For someone who already has a Windows machine (still the majority, I believe) you just replaced one roadblock with another. One is technical and the other is financial (buying a Mac). Really, Norvig sums this up best: "When asked "what operating system should I use, Windows, Unix, or Mac?", my answer is usually: "use whatever your friends use." " (I use a Mac and think it's swell, but I definitely couldn't have shelled out for one as a high schooler learning to program, but could burn a weekend dual booting Linux)

fl3tch 15y ago
> you just replaced one roadblock with another. One is technical and the other is financial (buying a Mac) I think you hit on an important point. Most people seem to be approaching this from an adult / professional perspective. I'm thinking of the bright 14-year-old kid who wants to learn about computers. He (or his parents) may not be able to afford a $2000 Macbook, but he could build his own box relatively cheaply and put a free operating system on it. Linux is democratizing that way. And he can download the source code to virtually everything running on that box. That has undoubtedly inspired a few programmers.
- pm90 15y ago
  I fully agree, since I am one such programmer. You cannot imagine how beneficial Linux has been in making it possible for students from countries like India to learn deeply and experiment with their systems.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

ImprovedSilence 15y ago

I didn't start to really understand how things all work and go together until I installed Linux on my desktop, and started exploring that world. I don't disagree with using OSX, in fact I use a Mac to do all my work now. But I never got started or interested or developed an understanding until I started using linux. Linux almost forces you to learn the underworkings of your system, computing in general, and loves to make you do work in the terminal. All good for learning programming. I used to have a jokes tab on my iGoogle page, one day the joke of the day was: "If you want you computer to work, use a mac, if you want to know how you computer works, use linux, and if you don't want to know why your computer doesn't work, use windows." I thought it was funny, and it was a step in my inspiration to use Linux. One analogy I'll make to promote learning on Linux: When I started playing guitar, any experienced player or teacher will tell you to learn on an acoustic guitar. Why? It's more challenging to make it sound good, you have to press harder on the strings, The strings are further away from the frets, you get buzz and damping if you don't use just the right form. It teaches you to over learn, then when you switch to an electric, it's easy peasy, and just sounds sooo good. I think in this case you could consider Linux to be the acoustic guitar, and Mac to be an electric. Just my two cents.

stepeight 15y ago
"I think in this case you could consider Linux to be the acoustic guitar, and Mac to be an electric." Does this make Windows the double-necked bass?
- zecho 15y ago
  Keytar.

kragen 15y ago

To my taste, Linux puts a lot less roadblocks in my way than MacOS does. Maybe my complaints that follow are simply due to my ignorance, in which case I hope you will take the time to correct me, but as far as I know they're real roadblocks. I want to see the source to the ls command? dpkg -S /bin/ls; apt-get source coreutils. I have no idea how to do that on MacOS. I want to be able to compile it? apt-get build-dep coreutils, which IIRC will install the compiler. The equivalent on MacOS involves signing up for a developer account with Apple, signing a contract that promises God knows what, and downloading a multi-gigabyte disk image. Even after installing, gcc still isn't in your PATH, and won't work properly with the platform SDK without a verbose -isysroot option. I want to make executable the file named gooba somewhere under my current directory? chmod +x $(find -name gooba). Apple's find requires an explicit `.` and maybe an explicit `-print`, I don't remember. Got performance problems on your machine? On Linux you have htop, dstat, iotop, powertop, and latencytop, none of which have MacOS equivalents as far as I know. Even plain old top has keystroke commands to switch between sorting by CPU and sorting by resident set size. As far as I can tell, doing that on MacOS requires restarting top with different command-line options. And there's no package-management system, so if you're building a server-based app, good luck installing the same versions of the same libraries on the server that you tested against in development. Or on your new dev box. And the server's probably running Linux anyway. Also, where the fuck is strace? Dtruss is a fucking piece of shit. Admittedly XCode is a pretty nice IDE, but there are a lot of nice IDEs out there, and most of them run on Linux too. And I'd love to have dtrace on Linux.

jorgecastillo 15y ago
http://opensource.apple.com/ http://opensource.apple.com/
- kragen 15y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by that. Maybe you're trying to say that, yes, there are a hell of a lot of serious roadblocks?
  - 0x09 15y ago

SkyMarshal 15y ago

Fwiw, in my own experience, I learned more about how computers and computing work from the first year of exclusively using Linux than from a decade of using Windows. Windows is designed from scratch to hide all that and abstract it into a GUI. Linux both forces you to figure stuff out, and enables you to, which in my case also motivated me to. I don't know how that would have worked out had I been using OS X instead of Linux though, maybe the same since it's BSD-based. But I suspect Linux may be the only one where you can feel full ownership over your own system, and can be motivated by the knowledge that if you take the time and effort to figure it out, you can make it do anything you want to. That personal, emotional investment I believe is the most important, rewarding, and incentivizing aspect of learning computers, computing, programming, and/or CS.

pasbesoin 15y ago
Windows is also designed to make you start paying to get at details. And keep paying. If you are e.g. a youngster, or a "this should be automated" worker who doesn't have any tech budget, this can be a significant hindrance. (Yes, I know there are now various MS initiatives such as the Express Studios and Spark whatnot. There didn't used to be (I wonder what changed ;-), and I remain skeptical.)

larsberg 15y ago

It's funny that you mention the keyboard shortcuts! When I talk to old hackers on Linux about moving to OSX, I tell them, "well, if you move, you don't have to configure your power management and display drivers and it has Emacs keybindings in all the windows!" and they get excited. When I talk to young CS undergraduates --- all of whom have Macs, because it's not an engineering college --- I tell them, "you should learn Emacs; I know it's in a terminal, but it has all of the OSX keybindings you already started to learn!" and they get excited.

rbanffy 15y ago

I think Linux is a much richer development environment than OSX and much easier to manage through package managers like apt or yum. Sorry, but nothing on OSX comes close. Plus, you get an insanely rich collection of interpreters, compilers and assorted tools and it runs on just about any computer you already have. Cygwin can make life under Windows bearable, but there is a long list of confusing things people have to deal with such as the /cygdrive tree and executables always having the .exe extension. "ls" autocompleting to "ls.exe"?