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Comment by typon | Hacker News Reader

With VSCode and Typescript, Microsoft owned the web developer space - a feat that I would not have predicted them doing 10 years ago. How did Google/Facebook get beaten here?

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Well I'd point out that Facebook gave us react, basically altering the default programming paradigm for webdev, and Google, well Google plays God and judges all Webdevs via SEO. Plus regardless of what folks think of Flutter, Google has done some incredible work there. There's some very interesting things happening with it related to WebDev that are slowly but surely coming. Real cross platform native desktop support (as in compiled, not interpreted, imagine no more electron apps taking up huge amounts of RAM and being slow while they do it), ahead of time compilation to native platform code for arbitrary dart executables, and transpilation to js from Dart, which will soon have sound null safety enabled by default, all in a single code base is pretty wild. So, I'd say Google is making moves in a very interesting direction.

I really hope Flutter for web does come together and doesn't get abandoned or become nerfed or neglected via Google's ever shifting product teams, I like it so much better than any javascript framework out there.

There's angular for Google and Microsoft too, even though React is better for a lot of use cases, a lot of traditional devs still place their bets in Angular. As a brazilian a see this a lot in some regions of the country. We can't forget the differences in context of the different parts of the world

Don’t forget chrome. It is pushing the web forward so fast that the great Firefox has been in the backseat for nearly a decade.

I think WSL should also be listed among awesome new developer amenities from Microsoft. I know a lot of people view it as a capitulation considering its Microsoft, but WSL is such a great tool.

I purchased a Macbook about 2 years ago out of curiosity, as it seems a lot of developers prefer them. I'll admit the screen is beautiful, but so much of the developer niceties are simply the Mac taking advantage of POSIX interoperability. As WSL continues to grow, I could definitely see going back to a Windows machine.

I think WSL will get there eventually but in its current state it's just more tedious to use for permissions/networking/compatability issues. Mostly things you can work around but just a bit more tinkering

(disclosure I work for Microsoft but not on this stuff)

Biggest benefit for me has been how simple it has made ssh on Windows. I got a nicer spec'd Surface Laptop 3 during my last hardware refresh and haven't missed Macbook at all.

Confusing. Do you mean as an ssh server? Because there is no functional difference between Cygwin ssh client running in mintty vs WSL (1 or 2, doesn't matter) ssh running in wsltty. I think if I sat you down in front of them and switched them out you wouldn't notice a thing.

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh

I think he's referring to the SSH integration inside VS code so you can open up a remote folder as if it was a local one in the IDE

Maybe this isn’t what you mean, but Microsoft shipping OpenSSH client/server in W10 is totally separate from WSL. (It’s really helpful though!)

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh I think he's referring to the SSH integration inside VS code so you can open up a remote folder as if it was a local one in the IDE

POSIX interoperability isn't to be taken lightly. WSL is currently still pretty far imo from the native experience you get in Linux and Mac. Mac is also the only system that allows easy development of any platform, though of course that's primarily because of locking down development for their stuff.

Macs are popular dev machines because they couple the above with a very polished and stable widely compatible OS. The broad market appeal with the advantages of Unix like terminal and file system and a package manager. The screen isn't even that great, I'd take the XPS screen over the Macbook's.

And what is wrong with running a native Linux through VMware player etc?

Microsoft has always had a huge developer tools footprint, so it's a natural fit.

That they did, but VS had always been aimed at MS tech stack: VC++, VB, C#, F#. And then VS Code appeared seemingly out of the blue, rapidly becoming the editor of choice for languages all across the tech landscape.

I think the VSCode extension marketplace greatly helps with the huge breadth of tooling. Not sure if this is applicable to regular Visual Studio as well, I've honestly never used it.

Visual Studio (full edition) doesn't have extensions. It's a full blown IDE and everything is built-in. Despite having a similar name, the two products sharing almost nothing in common.

I'm pretty late to this, but Visual Studio (full edition) does have extensions. Resharper, for instance, is a popular Visual Studio extension.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/

The first version of Microsoft made BASIC interpreters for any and every "home computer" that asked them to (and was willing to buy it). For a large chunk of the lifetime of the Macintosh, Microsoft was the largest Mac OS application developer, and cross-platform C++ tools was important for that. The Microsoft of "only one tech stack" is probably the outlier, more than the rule.

> With VSCode and Typescript, Microsoft owned the web developer space

I think buying NPM and GitHub, and inducing Docker to add Windows support, got them more (in the long run) in this space than those two things.

TypeScript is miles ahead of others I'm surprised. Swift can't even tell it's no longer a "nil" after "if some_var != nil" and felt like I'm helping the language instead of the other way and PHP's typing is still very young and Ruby seems to be introducing some weird declaration file instead of simple inline typing.

Plus they iterate faster than anyone else out there and upgrading is painless (VSCode, not Windows)

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