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Can someone explain this part to me: "And during that decade, almost every such developer I knew switched to the Mac if they weren't already there, partly beca

Can someone explain this part to me: "And during that decade, almost every such developer I knew switched to the Mac if they weren't already there, partly because it was better for developing web apps." This is the first time I've ever heard anyone make this claim, which seems dubious at best. How in the world is the Mac better for developing web apps?

_pius 14y ago
Easy, it's a POSIX-compliant OS and the vast majority of the web is deployed on servers with a similar environment. This is doubly true of the consumer-oriented web apps that Marco's talking about.
- WayneDB 14y ago
  There are just as many, if not more job listings for ASP.Net than *nix related web development environments.
  - _pius 14y ago
    That's definitely not true for jobs doing consumer-oriented web development, as Marco was talking about. Even if it were true, though, it doesn't contradict my point. Most of the web does not run on ASP.Net ... that's a fact.
  - BobPalmer 14y ago
    I see pretty comparable numbers of listings for Python, Ruby/RoR, Java, and .Net (although if you add up all of the nix web dev jobs and bundle Python, PHP, and Ruby together vs. .Net, you're going to see a lot more of the former). For web dev in general the split is pretty even, but if I am looking more at startups or small shops, the balance shifts towards Python/RoR (with Javascript being pretty ubiquitous whether you are on .Net, Java, RoR, or Python). Still see this more of a tooling cost issue though, which makes sense. MS licensing is not cheap, although I've worked with a suprising number of startups that are on the MS stack, or using a combination of languages.
  - adgar 14y ago
    Do you think all those ASP.Net sites are more likely to be delivered on the web to a diverse selection of evolving, modern user agents, or on an internal network to only IE7 users until 2019? One opportunity has a choice in development tools. The other doesn't, really. The former market for developer mindshare can and does change; the latter is Microsoft's entrenched base which is never really in jeopardy (nor very relevant to the growth of the tech field at large).
- BobPalmer 14y ago
  I'd disagree that this has any relation to it being 'better for developing web apps'. I write code and work with teams coding a multitude of languages and environments (on Windows, Mac, and various nix flavors), and the developer experience in the Microsoft toolset is pretty impressive. I'd expect the shift to be more a function of cost, since it's a lot easier for a startup to spin up on OSS vs. procure Windows licensing, and it's also a lot easier to get free hosting deals like Heroku, etc. than Windows (although I expect BizSpark is changing some of that). So I do agree that there are some appealing reasons to start projects on nix and OSS, but ease of development and quality of tooling (i.e. a 'better development experience') is likely not at the top of the list.
  - _pius 14y ago
    I'd disagree that this has any relation to it being 'better for developing web apps'. As someone who dealt with the nightmare of trying to develop Ruby on Rails apps on Windows in 2006, I assure you that this was a significant issue. I'd expect the shift to be more a function of cost, since it's a lot easier for a startup to spin up on OSS vs. procure Windows licensing, and it's also a lot easier to get free hosting deals like Heroku ... This is also true. In general, Windows was not an ideal environment for developing for the web.
    - BobPalmer 14y ago
      Oh, no debate on trying to build Ruby apps on Windows (been there, done that - which is why I have a separate Ubuntu partition for that). But more the point that if I am building a web app in, say, ASP.Net MVC using Visual Studio 2010/2012, the tooling is excellent. Since the article is talking about Windows Developers, it's probably fair to assume that most of them are knocking out code in Visual Studio. And regardless of one's opinions on Microsoft, it's hard to argue with the quality of their developer tools. I'd agree then that Windows is not an ideal environment for Ruby development, but not all web dev is in Ruby, and windows is an excellent web development environment if you're building out on the Microsoft stack.
      - contextfree 14y ago
simonw 14y ago
Simple - the Mac was the only machine which could run all of the browsers you needed to test on. A Mac + VMWare (or Parallels) lets you test on Safari, multiple versions of IE, and Chrome/Opera/Firefox on both Windows, Mac and Linux. Of course, the reason for this is that until very recently Apple wouldn't let any version of OS X run under virtualization on any other platform, so if you wanted to test in Safari you had to have a Mac. I think OS X can now be run virtualized, but that's a very recent change. Aside from browser testing though, having a Unix-based operating system certainly makes development using the open source web stack much easier (though of course you can always run virtualized Ubuntu on Windows).
- jaredsohn 14y ago
  >so if you wanted to test in Safari you had to have a Mac. There has been a Windows port of Safari for awhile so that point isn't correct unless you meant that you couldn't test Safari/Mac unless you had a Mac.
  - toyg 14y ago
    Safari for Windows is a terrible, terrible browser, and doesn't even mirror the Mac version in terms of rendering webpages. Completely useless.
jarjoura 14y ago
Apple fully embraced the open source community as a launch-pad for Mac OS X a decade ago. So the initial early adopters were all Unix/Linux enthusiasts that were establishing all the web technologies. Plus, for the first time you could compile apache and use Photoshop in the same environment. Then developers who were there early on because of that, started writing the tools that later became the standard. (eg. TextMate, Transmit)

_pius 14y ago

Easy, it's a POSIX-compliant OS and the vast majority of the web is deployed on servers with a similar environment. This is doubly true of the consumer-oriented web apps that Marco's talking about.

WayneDB 14y ago
There are just as many, if not more job listings for ASP.Net than *nix related web development environments.
- _pius 14y ago
  That's definitely not true for jobs doing consumer-oriented web development, as Marco was talking about. Even if it were true, though, it doesn't contradict my point. Most of the web does not run on ASP.Net ... that's a fact.
- BobPalmer 14y ago
  I see pretty comparable numbers of listings for Python, Ruby/RoR, Java, and .Net (although if you add up all of the nix web dev jobs and bundle Python, PHP, and Ruby together vs. .Net, you're going to see a lot more of the former). For web dev in general the split is pretty even, but if I am looking more at startups or small shops, the balance shifts towards Python/RoR (with Javascript being pretty ubiquitous whether you are on .Net, Java, RoR, or Python). Still see this more of a tooling cost issue though, which makes sense. MS licensing is not cheap, although I've worked with a suprising number of startups that are on the MS stack, or using a combination of languages.
- adgar 14y ago
  Do you think all those ASP.Net sites are more likely to be delivered on the web to a diverse selection of evolving, modern user agents, or on an internal network to only IE7 users until 2019? One opportunity has a choice in development tools. The other doesn't, really. The former market for developer mindshare can and does change; the latter is Microsoft's entrenched base which is never really in jeopardy (nor very relevant to the growth of the tech field at large).
BobPalmer 14y ago
I'd disagree that this has any relation to it being 'better for developing web apps'. I write code and work with teams coding a multitude of languages and environments (on Windows, Mac, and various nix flavors), and the developer experience in the Microsoft toolset is pretty impressive. I'd expect the shift to be more a function of cost, since it's a lot easier for a startup to spin up on OSS vs. procure Windows licensing, and it's also a lot easier to get free hosting deals like Heroku, etc. than Windows (although I expect BizSpark is changing some of that). So I do agree that there are some appealing reasons to start projects on nix and OSS, but ease of development and quality of tooling (i.e. a 'better development experience') is likely not at the top of the list.
- _pius 14y ago
  I'd disagree that this has any relation to it being 'better for developing web apps'. As someone who dealt with the nightmare of trying to develop Ruby on Rails apps on Windows in 2006, I assure you that this was a significant issue. I'd expect the shift to be more a function of cost, since it's a lot easier for a startup to spin up on OSS vs. procure Windows licensing, and it's also a lot easier to get free hosting deals like Heroku ... This is also true. In general, Windows was not an ideal environment for developing for the web.
  - BobPalmer 14y ago
    Oh, no debate on trying to build Ruby apps on Windows (been there, done that - which is why I have a separate Ubuntu partition for that). But more the point that if I am building a web app in, say, ASP.Net MVC using Visual Studio 2010/2012, the tooling is excellent. Since the article is talking about Windows Developers, it's probably fair to assume that most of them are knocking out code in Visual Studio. And regardless of one's opinions on Microsoft, it's hard to argue with the quality of their developer tools. I'd agree then that Windows is not an ideal environment for Ruby development, but not all web dev is in Ruby, and windows is an excellent web development environment if you're building out on the Microsoft stack.
    - contextfree 14y ago

simonw 14y ago

Simple - the Mac was the only machine which could run all of the browsers you needed to test on. A Mac + VMWare (or Parallels) lets you test on Safari, multiple versions of IE, and Chrome/Opera/Firefox on both Windows, Mac and Linux. Of course, the reason for this is that until very recently Apple wouldn't let any version of OS X run under virtualization on any other platform, so if you wanted to test in Safari you had to have a Mac. I think OS X can now be run virtualized, but that's a very recent change. Aside from browser testing though, having a Unix-based operating system certainly makes development using the open source web stack much easier (though of course you can always run virtualized Ubuntu on Windows).

jaredsohn 14y ago
>so if you wanted to test in Safari you had to have a Mac. There has been a Windows port of Safari for awhile so that point isn't correct unless you meant that you couldn't test Safari/Mac unless you had a Mac.
- toyg 14y ago
  Safari for Windows is a terrible, terrible browser, and doesn't even mirror the Mac version in terms of rendering webpages. Completely useless.

jarjoura 14y ago

Apple fully embraced the open source community as a launch-pad for Mac OS X a decade ago. So the initial early adopters were all Unix/Linux enthusiasts that were establishing all the web technologies. Plus, for the first time you could compile apache and use Photoshop in the same environment. Then developers who were there early on because of that, started writing the tools that later became the standard. (eg. TextMate, Transmit)