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Comment by weavejester | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, it depends what you're developing in. If you're developing in .NET, Windows isn't a bad platform. Anything else, and Windows starts to feel like a second-class citizen. For instance, a lot of tools written in Ruby tend to assume a Unix-like environment, even though the language itself is cross-platform.

The other problem with Windows is that it doesn't make a very good server, and it's often useful to develop on the same OS you'll be eventually deploying to.

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Windows is surely a better server than OS X. Also, the tool set for web development on Windows is very mature and stable.

Google is making a business decision here: it is too expensive for them to support Windows at the level of security they desire, which is likely a higher standard than most software development shops, and perhaps many banks.

"Windows is surely a better server than OS X."

I've been unable to find anything equivalent to Puppet or Chef on Windows. Might I enquire what tools you use for managing Windows servers?

That said, I doubt I'd ever actually use an OSX server. There's little difference in functionality between an OSX server and a Linux server, and Linux servers have no licensing costs to worry about. Currently we're developing on OSX and Linux desktops, and deploying to Linux servers.

"Also, the tool set for web development on Windows is very mature and stable."

For .NET, maybe. Not for something like Ruby, I'm afraid. Also, we haven't found any good way of deploying to Windows. I'd be curious how you manage deploying applications to a Windows server.

For .NET, maybe. Not for something like Ruby

This is ignoring PHP (one of the biggest web dev languages) and Python which do just as well on both.

Also I have never seen the need to develop on the same platform as your server (if your using a local server, well, then that makes sense - but it's not the best workflow and, in addition, that is not a limitation of the development but of the server requirements :))

I won't disagree Ruby is better on Linux though.

If you're the sole developer, it makes a lot of sense to run a local server for development purposes. It's cheaper, more convenient and really helpful if you're stuck somewhere with a poor Internet connection.

I develop Django on Windows, and I deploy on Windows as well. You can use PowerShell to script all of your deployment and server management operations, and you can remotely invoke all of those scripts as well.

I tried RoR on Windows, and it is a second class citizen IMO, so I switched to Python/Django, and I've been happy since. Python/Django are pretty blissfully OS agnostic.

"You can use PowerShell to script all of your deployment and server management operations, and you can remotely invoke all of those scripts as well."

I've looked into powershell, but remote powershell isn't much better than shell scripts executed over SSH (and in some ways worse). Tools like Capistrano, Puppet, Chef, etc. don't seem to exist for Windows as yet.

Windows is surely a better server than OS X

OS X is pretty Unixy and has the ability to run virtually all the Unixy server stuff that runs on other Unixy platforms which are generally considered top tier server platforms. It's entirely possible that Windows is a better server, but you can't expect people to accept a statement like that on its face. Please provide some evidence.

Windows is surely a better server than OS X? OS X comes with an Apache server already set up and ready to go at the flick of a switch. I find it quite satisfactory for testing sites before I go to online testing. I can also fire up a Windows VM and navigate to my local ip, for quick cross browser testing.

Right. If you develop for Windows, then Windows is a pretty good platform.

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