Ask HN: How many of you use Windows for web development? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How many of you use Windows for web development?

6 pointspinkunicorn9 comments

I am just curious because I've a general aversion towards using any Microsoft products for development. Is it just me or are there a significant number of you who dread the idea of doing web dev on Microsoft platform?

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I have had problems in the past with Windows. Every Rails tutorial I tried on Windows I would run in to problems. And spend hours trying to sort them out and find work arounds for windows specific issues.

Try the same tutorial on a Mac and it would just work. The time I save using a Mac is well worth any slight premium.

Actually my current windows laptop cost more than my macbook air. The air has more than enough power for developing web applications.

Both Windows and Mac have their fan boys/camps. I use both, but prefer Mac for development.

The general, fuzzy, "I don't like it" sentiment will keep you from trying many new things. I once had the same aversion towards Rails, but forced myself to try it. I learned a lot in the process.

Give it a shot and see how you feel. Install VS Code on Linux and play around with ASP.NET MVC or WebAPI to see what it offers.

Whenever I have a general "I don't like it" sentiment I usually will give something a go until I have some concrete reasons for why "I don't like it". It's a pretty solid filtering mechanism for me and helps me explore new things and at the same time confirm or reject my initial reaction(s).

Mostly Windows inside a Linux terminal, but these days I have so many VM's open it is tough to say. It's weird, I am a hardcore Linux enthusiast and use Linux as my home desktop, but I still use Windows as my work PC / laptop PC but most of them time am inside a VM, remote desktop VPS or Linux shell.

Edit: I know there are some languages that just suck on MS. RoR I've heard is horrible. I made 1 attempt at getting a good environment setup and failed miserably. Partly bc of the poor documentation, or should I say conflicting documentation.

I have used Windows for the editing of web content since about 2000 or so. Before then all of my web work was in Unix, both sides, but Windows 2000 was the first version of Windows that was really any good.

Usually I use a Linux web server, but I have worked at places that use IIS and it is really not all bad. Microsoft had some very good ideas in ASP.NET that were compromised by a few mistakes, and if they had fixed the mistakes instead of creating a new MVC framework every year since then, it would be sweet.

Today I mostly code in Java or other JVM language, and can run a good test environment, if not everything on Windows but I deploy to Ubuntu Linux in the cloud.

After moving to Azure Websites for hosting, I started developing my web app in Win10 and so far it has worked great for me. My app stack is -

* ReactJS * Flask * SQLAlchemy * SQL Azure

My dev tools are -

* Atom for JS dev * PyCharm for server side code * SQL Express for dev db

All the CLI tools for both React and Flask (and Python in general) work pretty well in Win10 PowerShell.

Note, my main dev environment is Ubuntu with scipy/scikit-learn in Python but I have always been pretty comfortable with Windows and PowerShell.

Have you looked into Python Tools for Visual Studio (https://microsoft.github.io/PTVS/)? If you haven't, it's well worth a shot.

I've done a little bit of python and nodejs and quite a bit of java in Windows. It's pretty much all doable unless you rely on libraries that are linux only. Java was a little less painful than python and nodejs. Also, when I discovered ConEmu and started using that with msys git bash, development in Windows wasn't too terrible for nodejs. For python in Windows, I used the anaconda ecosystem, but I much rather prefer developing python on a linux machine.

Which products are you thinking of in particular?

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