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My experience was the opposite. I started programming with C and Perl. How are you supposed to do that on Windows? Setting up the system to be able to run co

by jfarmer 17y ago

My experience was the opposite. I started programming with C and Perl. How are you supposed to do that on Windows? Setting up the system to be able to run compiler commands from the command line is very hard on Windows. On Mac/Linux/UNIX you get that all for free, out of the box, and every tutorial on the web makes sense. With MS it's always some crazy proprietary thing that is hard to find good documentation for (at least it was ~10 years ago, when I was starting to program). I never got serious about programming until I switched to Linux (I use a Mac, now) because it was just too hard to get started on Windows.

joe_the_user 17y ago
I've done lots of windows command line programming, mostly in Ruby but some Perl . That was in the last 2-4 years, so it has gotten better but I also did Python programming seven years ago and it wasn't hard at all. Scite is free and more or less the same on all platforms. Windows C++ command line programming is a bit of a pain but it's just the same setting-your-configuration-pain-in-the-neck that everyone is complaining about Linux having. I can navigate files with vi but has always been the least intuitive system I could imagine, like brainfuck but not a joke.
- jfarmer 17y ago
  Sure, but were you learning how to program? At the time I didn't know what a compiler was, let alone the nuts and bolts of installing one and getting it running. I was a self-taught 15-year-old and the only one in my hometown interested in this stuff. Making that happen on Windows was very difficult, IMO. I remember using something called LCC-Win32? Moving to *ix made a world of difference for me from a programming and sysadmin perspective. Everything works "out of the box" and the space is less fragmented because everyone uses gcc/g++. There are a million tutorials explaining step-by-step how to write a C/C++ program and compile it. Installing a printer on the other hand... :)
  - joe_the_user 17y ago
    For command-line workability, I suppose there have been many levels of problems in the nix and the PC world. Going way back to when I was learning to program, I couldn't get Unix working at all. The folks at the college who understood it loved to make that understanding a mark of their superior condition rather than helping in any way. This was well before Linux. Unix terminal configuration is pretty much the most screwed-up, evil thing in the world. At the college where I was learning to program, most of the terminals were irrevocably mis-configured at the server level (or at least some level we had no control over) but the admins pretended it was the student's fault. And the present screwed-up configuration of the various flavors of desktop Linux can be traced to their support of the various archaic terminal flavors as a default. And it really shouldn't be assumed that Unix was step forward from UI's that existed in the really old systems. I learned my hatred of vi from a truly old school programmer who went back to far before Unix existed and could verify that there was no excuse for it's pathological absurdity - it wasn't a "step forward" from the editors that existed before - rather, it's popularity has to do with accidents of markets and college sysadmin culture. Here DOS (not Windows) was great. I just got a simple compiler and did a did of command-line stuff. The Borland c++ ide was great back in that day...
    - jfarmer 17y ago
      I don't think Unix was a step forward in terms of a UI, but as a programming environment it's a lot easier to go from zero to something than Windows (IMO). That's all I'm saying. Now I use a Mac and have the best of both worlds!

by jfarmer 17y ago

joe_the_user 17y ago

I've done lots of windows command line programming, mostly in Ruby but some Perl . That was in the last 2-4 years, so it has gotten better but I also did Python programming seven years ago and it wasn't hard at all. Scite is free and more or less the same on all platforms. Windows C++ command line programming is a bit of a pain but it's just the same setting-your-configuration-pain-in-the-neck that everyone is complaining about Linux having. I can navigate files with vi but has always been the least intuitive system I could imagine, like brainfuck but not a joke.

jfarmer 17y ago
Sure, but were you learning how to program? At the time I didn't know what a compiler was, let alone the nuts and bolts of installing one and getting it running. I was a self-taught 15-year-old and the only one in my hometown interested in this stuff. Making that happen on Windows was very difficult, IMO. I remember using something called LCC-Win32? Moving to *ix made a world of difference for me from a programming and sysadmin perspective. Everything works "out of the box" and the space is less fragmented because everyone uses gcc/g++. There are a million tutorials explaining step-by-step how to write a C/C++ program and compile it. Installing a printer on the other hand... :)
- joe_the_user 17y ago
  For command-line workability, I suppose there have been many levels of problems in the nix and the PC world. Going way back to when I was learning to program, I couldn't get Unix working at all. The folks at the college who understood it loved to make that understanding a mark of their superior condition rather than helping in any way. This was well before Linux. Unix terminal configuration is pretty much the most screwed-up, evil thing in the world. At the college where I was learning to program, most of the terminals were irrevocably mis-configured at the server level (or at least some level we had no control over) but the admins pretended it was the student's fault. And the present screwed-up configuration of the various flavors of desktop Linux can be traced to their support of the various archaic terminal flavors as a default. And it really shouldn't be assumed that Unix was step forward from UI's that existed in the really old systems. I learned my hatred of vi from a truly old school programmer who went back to far before Unix existed and could verify that there was no excuse for it's pathological absurdity - it wasn't a "step forward" from the editors that existed before - rather, it's popularity has to do with accidents of markets and college sysadmin culture. Here DOS (not Windows) was great. I just got a simple compiler and did a did of command-line stuff. The Borland c++ ide was great back in that day...
  - jfarmer 17y ago
    I don't think Unix was a step forward in terms of a UI, but as a programming environment it's a lot easier to go from zero to something than Windows (IMO). That's all I'm saying. Now I use a Mac and have the best of both worlds!