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Comment by smortaz | Hacker News Reader

[msft] :). Interestingly enough, the decision to use linux/docker was a no-brainer. I know from the outside it might seem odd, but these days, the attitude (and rightly so) is: use the language/stack/OS/toolchain/etc. you need to get your job done. I think you'll see an explosion of Linux/Python/Java/Go/... internally & externally on Azure.

Data point - our team (Python), wanted to hold a "Python day @ msft" event to teach/inform internal teams on the language/ecosystem. We were hoping maybe 50..100 would show up, if lucky. A thousand and twenty one people showed up!

Another data point - the official Azure CLI was just rewritten in Python (win/macos/linux):

https://github.com/Azure/azure-cli

Thanks!

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It does make so much sense. Makes it easier and quicker to get things out the door.

I'm a performance guy at my work responsible for making sure our Filesystem (Huge codebase of C, and bits of C++), making use of Python to quickly write scripts for Performance data analysis. Right tool for the job.

It is interesting to think about how many use cases there are in this ecosystem where that hard attention to performance is "wanted" but not needed. Could I write my scripts in a complied language and save two seconds of execution time? Yes, but I finished two more tasks in the time it would've taken to do it.

Maybe it runs on Linux because jupyterhub does not work on Windows, not even on Linux subsystem? Microsoft ported docker to Windows, please do the same with jupyterhub!

[msft] Hi dnfromufa. Actually the decision to go with linux/docker was purely because, (at least) at that time, container mgmt was better on linux. In fact Azure ML backends run Windows and you can use notebooks to build ML models, then deploy to windows backends. Thank you Python & Anaconda xplat support!

RE Jupyterhub on Windows - if enough customers want it, I'm sure it can be done. Not convinced the demand is there yet. If you have data I'd love to see it!

Thanks.

Here is some activity recently on this issue, but Jupyter team is not interested:

https://github.com/jupyterhub/jupyterhub/issues/703

Also original issue here and "Wontfix" comment:

https://github.com/jupyterhub/jupyterhub/issues/7

[msft] Thanks for digging! Honestly I understand as their team is actively trying to make things like jupyterlab work well right now. My guess is that if services like ours become wildly popular, someone (msft?) may step up and do & maintain the Windows port. I'm sure it'll be popular at Wall Street etc type shops. TBD.

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