7 ms·

What exactly can you do from your (presumably since it's HN) Mac that you can't do from Windows that's preventing you from switching now?

by skrowl 11y ago

zeendo 11y ago
Probably iOS development?
- miguelrochefort 11y ago
  I've been doing iOS development on a PC for years.
eropple 11y ago
Not the OP, but for me: use Unix. Cygwin is not a sufficient alternative to having an actual, working Unix that works as I expect it to when I use it, with a decent terminal emulator on top of it. (PowerShell is both non-substitutable and inferior.) Windows-the-desktop is fine, though I don't like it. Windows-the-workstation is, even with the plus that is Visual Studio, still a considerable distance behind even Linux, to say nothing of OS X.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  > Visual Studio, still a considerable distance behind even Linux, to say nothing of OS X. Which wonderful Linux and OS X tools offer the debugging and profiling capabilities of Visual Studio, specially for multi-threaded code? Which wonderful Linux and OS X tools offer code navigation across large scale enterprise projects and architecture design? Which wonderful Linux and OS X tools offer UI tooling like XAML and Blend?
  - ska 11y ago
    Your selective quoting is misleading. The post said: "...even with the plus that is Visual Studio,... " And you're touting things you value in VS. I think that he poster was saying that for them the good parts of VS don't make up for other shortcomings of windows as a workstation...
    - eropple 11y ago
      Precisely. I've been seeing a lot of this mendacious quoting lately, what's with this fad?
    - pjmlp 11y ago
      I find that Windows is closer to the Xerox PARC workstation model than UNIX will ever be.
      - rbanffy 11y ago
        Only if you mean "doesn't play well with the other kids". I have studied the Alto and Star and I can't imagine why you would think they are similar to Windows except in their insularity.
        pjmlp 11y ago
        Poweshell playing the same role as the workspace/transcript, which access to the whole system, including libraries and running applications. Specially given it is just yet another .NET programming language. I am not aware of any UNIX shell that offers a REPL like capability by allowing to interact with system libraries, do IPC with existing applications or system devices. .NET, COM and WinRT play a similar role as the rich programming frameworks Interlisp-D, Smallatalk and Cedar had. Focus on a mixture of AOT and JIT code for the programming environments, with memory safe languages. Memory unsafe languages currently used on the lower levels and performance hotspots. An IDE with graphical debuggers and incremental development support, as the main way to develop applications. Focus on being a good workstation OS first, with server abilities as second focus.
  - anewhnaccount 11y ago
    Eclipse?
- ntakasaki 11y ago
  Personal anecdote time. Have been using Linux off and on since 2000. Later my job required .NET, so got into the MS stack but still kept playing around with Linux for things like IRC bots etc. Then at work there was a major open source push, and we did a big project using Drupal. Used Eclipse and Netbeans(mostly this), deployed to Ubuntu server for dev and RHEL/CentOS for prod. I can sling Vim but never like Emacs(you need a second nose to type some of the shortcuts!) I was DevOps because only I in the team had Linux experience beforehand. There were some good things but C# vs. PHP was no contest as was VS vs. Netbeans/Eclipse. Ubuntu vs. CentOS/RHEL was quite annoying because there were small meaningless fragmentation differences like Apache daemon as httpd in one and apache2 in the other. Really? Why? I found myself raging at them sometimes. After doing that for a year, back to VS and .NET and it felt like a relief. I liked the power of nginx though which we used as a reverse proxy for the Drupal project.
  - eropple 11y ago
    So you don't like PHP and Eclipse. Sure. Neither do I. I write Scala in IntelliJ, or Ruby in Sublime Text, or even C# deployed on Linux with CoreCLR or Mono. And you're not "DevOps" when you have a little Linux experience, and mixing Ubuntu and CentOS without thinking about the consequences thereof is...well, it's your own bad decision. Historical reasons drive the behaviors of one versus the other. (You should know about historical reasons for things. They're much of why Windows is incoherent, too.) But, more to my original point: I like .NET. I've been using it since 2005. I have Visual Studio open in Parallels right now. But I do recognize that the environment is a trash fire the moment you consider doing anything remotely outside the lines, and the lack of a serious, user-focused glue system (PowerShell ain't it, it's obviously not designed as a REPL language from the jump) is crippling. Peter Bright over at Ars has suggested reviving the subsystem model for Windows and incorporating a FreeBSD layer, and I'm all for that. Because I don't dislike Windows. I just can't get things done in it.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - sudioStudio64 11y ago
- maccard 11y ago
  What's wrong with powershell?why can't you substitute it, and why is it inferior?
  - sudioStudio64 11y ago
    Its just not. The problem is that experienced UNIX admins get frustrated when it doesn't work like UNIX. If you take the time to learn how it works it amazing.
  - rspeer 11y ago
    Are you really asking why you can't substitute PowerShell for a UNIX shell? There is basically no way in which they are compatible. Even if you decided to re-invent all your UNIX scripts and tools on PowerShell, you'd be missing most of the composable tools that make UNIX what it is. And PowerShell as a user interface is quite poor compared to, say, a 15-year-old version of GNOME Terminal.
    - WalterGR 11y ago
      Even if you decided to re-invent all your UNIX scripts and tools on PowerShell, you'd be missing most of the composable tools that make UNIX what it is. PowerShell's composability is based on piping objects rather than piping text. Do you mean that PowerShell can't achieve the same composability that can be achieved on Unix, or that PowerShell lacks for example `cut`?
      - eropple 11y ago
        To be honest: no, PowerShell can't (practically) achieve the same composability that can be achieved on Windows. Both because of the aforementioned general malaise of writing it throwing up very real roadblocks, but also because not everything under the sun is a .NET application. You get "hack together a text pipeline and hope all your objects implement ToString in a meaningful way" or "break out Visual Studio and write some converters", which is, by my lights, significantly worse than just "hey, everything starts and ends as a stream of bytes, deal with it using the tools we know you have and work with every application you're going to use." And this is especially egregious with the lack of a Swiss-army-chainsaw scripting language in .NET to begin with.
- Amezarak 11y ago
  > (PowerShell is both non-substitutable and inferior.) Powershell is certainly not a substitutable shell, but as a terminal emulator, what does it lack that you need as of Windows 10? My only real complaint is the lack of tabbed windows. Though I am much more experienced with bash than Powershell, everything I've seen indicates that Powershell is anything but inferior. You have to learn new things (the built-in aliases help a little) but throwing around objects instead of text makes so many things less painful. SSH would be nice (I think the closest thing would be WinRM?) but that's coming now too. I don't think everything needs to be Unix. Unix is great but it's showing its age.
robertodelori 11y ago
I'm Rails developer - so this all comes to mentioned Unix and set of console tools. Ok, there are workarounds, one can use docker, vagrant, or whatever. I like to work in console as well - and as for now, this is a deal breaker for me.

What exactly can you do from your (presumably since it's HN) Mac that you can't do from Windows that's preventing you from switching now?

by skrowl 11y ago

What exactly can you do from your (presumably since it's HN) Mac that you can't do from Windows that's preventing you from switching now?

zeendo 11y ago

Probably iOS development?

miguelrochefort 11y ago
I've been doing iOS development on a PC for years.

eropple 11y ago

Not the OP, but for me: use Unix. Cygwin is not a sufficient alternative to having an actual, working Unix that works as I expect it to when I use it, with a decent terminal emulator on top of it. (PowerShell is both non-substitutable and inferior.) Windows-the-desktop is fine, though I don't like it. Windows-the-workstation is, even with the plus that is Visual Studio, still a considerable distance behind even Linux, to say nothing of OS X.

pjmlp 11y ago
> Visual Studio, still a considerable distance behind even Linux, to say nothing of OS X. Which wonderful Linux and OS X tools offer the debugging and profiling capabilities of Visual Studio, specially for multi-threaded code? Which wonderful Linux and OS X tools offer code navigation across large scale enterprise projects and architecture design? Which wonderful Linux and OS X tools offer UI tooling like XAML and Blend?
- ska 11y ago
  Your selective quoting is misleading. The post said: "...even with the plus that is Visual Studio,... " And you're touting things you value in VS. I think that he poster was saying that for them the good parts of VS don't make up for other shortcomings of windows as a workstation...
  - eropple 11y ago
    Precisely. I've been seeing a lot of this mendacious quoting lately, what's with this fad?
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    I find that Windows is closer to the Xerox PARC workstation model than UNIX will ever be.
    - rbanffy 11y ago
      Only if you mean "doesn't play well with the other kids". I have studied the Alto and Star and I can't imagine why you would think they are similar to Windows except in their insularity.
      - pjmlp 11y ago
        Poweshell playing the same role as the workspace/transcript, which access to the whole system, including libraries and running applications. Specially given it is just yet another .NET programming language. I am not aware of any UNIX shell that offers a REPL like capability by allowing to interact with system libraries, do IPC with existing applications or system devices. .NET, COM and WinRT play a similar role as the rich programming frameworks Interlisp-D, Smallatalk and Cedar had. Focus on a mixture of AOT and JIT code for the programming environments, with memory safe languages. Memory unsafe languages currently used on the lower levels and performance hotspots. An IDE with graphical debuggers and incremental development support, as the main way to develop applications. Focus on being a good workstation OS first, with server abilities as second focus.
- anewhnaccount 11y ago
  Eclipse?
ntakasaki 11y ago
Personal anecdote time. Have been using Linux off and on since 2000. Later my job required .NET, so got into the MS stack but still kept playing around with Linux for things like IRC bots etc. Then at work there was a major open source push, and we did a big project using Drupal. Used Eclipse and Netbeans(mostly this), deployed to Ubuntu server for dev and RHEL/CentOS for prod. I can sling Vim but never like Emacs(you need a second nose to type some of the shortcuts!) I was DevOps because only I in the team had Linux experience beforehand. There were some good things but C# vs. PHP was no contest as was VS vs. Netbeans/Eclipse. Ubuntu vs. CentOS/RHEL was quite annoying because there were small meaningless fragmentation differences like Apache daemon as httpd in one and apache2 in the other. Really? Why? I found myself raging at them sometimes. After doing that for a year, back to VS and .NET and it felt like a relief. I liked the power of nginx though which we used as a reverse proxy for the Drupal project.
- eropple 11y ago
  So you don't like PHP and Eclipse. Sure. Neither do I. I write Scala in IntelliJ, or Ruby in Sublime Text, or even C# deployed on Linux with CoreCLR or Mono. And you're not "DevOps" when you have a little Linux experience, and mixing Ubuntu and CentOS without thinking about the consequences thereof is...well, it's your own bad decision. Historical reasons drive the behaviors of one versus the other. (You should know about historical reasons for things. They're much of why Windows is incoherent, too.) But, more to my original point: I like .NET. I've been using it since 2005. I have Visual Studio open in Parallels right now. But I do recognize that the environment is a trash fire the moment you consider doing anything remotely outside the lines, and the lack of a serious, user-focused glue system (PowerShell ain't it, it's obviously not designed as a REPL language from the jump) is crippling. Peter Bright over at Ars has suggested reviving the subsystem model for Windows and incorporating a FreeBSD layer, and I'm all for that. Because I don't dislike Windows. I just can't get things done in it.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - sudioStudio64 11y ago
maccard 11y ago
What's wrong with powershell?why can't you substitute it, and why is it inferior?
- sudioStudio64 11y ago
  Its just not. The problem is that experienced UNIX admins get frustrated when it doesn't work like UNIX. If you take the time to learn how it works it amazing.
- rspeer 11y ago
  Are you really asking why you can't substitute PowerShell for a UNIX shell? There is basically no way in which they are compatible. Even if you decided to re-invent all your UNIX scripts and tools on PowerShell, you'd be missing most of the composable tools that make UNIX what it is. And PowerShell as a user interface is quite poor compared to, say, a 15-year-old version of GNOME Terminal.
  - WalterGR 11y ago
    Even if you decided to re-invent all your UNIX scripts and tools on PowerShell, you'd be missing most of the composable tools that make UNIX what it is. PowerShell's composability is based on piping objects rather than piping text. Do you mean that PowerShell can't achieve the same composability that can be achieved on Unix, or that PowerShell lacks for example `cut`?
    - eropple 11y ago
      To be honest: no, PowerShell can't (practically) achieve the same composability that can be achieved on Windows. Both because of the aforementioned general malaise of writing it throwing up very real roadblocks, but also because not everything under the sun is a .NET application. You get "hack together a text pipeline and hope all your objects implement ToString in a meaningful way" or "break out Visual Studio and write some converters", which is, by my lights, significantly worse than just "hey, everything starts and ends as a stream of bytes, deal with it using the tools we know you have and work with every application you're going to use." And this is especially egregious with the lack of a Swiss-army-chainsaw scripting language in .NET to begin with.
Amezarak 11y ago
> (PowerShell is both non-substitutable and inferior.) Powershell is certainly not a substitutable shell, but as a terminal emulator, what does it lack that you need as of Windows 10? My only real complaint is the lack of tabbed windows. Though I am much more experienced with bash than Powershell, everything I've seen indicates that Powershell is anything but inferior. You have to learn new things (the built-in aliases help a little) but throwing around objects instead of text makes so many things less painful. SSH would be nice (I think the closest thing would be WinRM?) but that's coming now too. I don't think everything needs to be Unix. Unix is great but it's showing its age.

robertodelori 11y ago

I'm Rails developer - so this all comes to mentioned Unix and set of console tools. Ok, there are workarounds, one can use docker, vagrant, or whatever. I like to work in console as well - and as for now, this is a deal breaker for me.