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> but Windows works consistently. So does SOAP. But not Unix or microformats or REST.

I have no idea that windows works consistently (?!) where unix (linux) or REST (?) doesn't.

I like the idea of what they're trying to get to, but sometimes it helps to cite examples.

imo, LARGELY the reason that "windows=business" is from historical lock-in effects. I, as a linux developer, still get ".xsl" files on the regular, who have each gone through 4-5 different business people before me.

windows is largely a "suite" of software, from OS, to Office, to even Internet Explorer. Business types often didn't (and perhaps still don't?) know what separates Word from calc.exe - it's the entire computer interface, it works, and it's what others are using. Only a big "everything-in-one-package" could hope to upset them, and even then might have a hard time doing it.

I don't think I'll ever try to purposely run much windows software again, but I do give them kudos for what they've achieved and continue (for now) to achieve.

but to say it works consistently!!?

I get the sentiment. Consistent means differently for different person.

As a non power user Windows is consistent enough.

Obviously not for power user who often stray from the green usage path of Windows.

Sort of like comparing working on a nodejs http server project on Windows vs working on a project that extensively uses winapi.

>why the vast majority of developers prefer to develop on Windows

Was that ever true?

It was true then and it's true today. Certainly not in HN or at 8-person startups nobody's ever heard of, but the vast majority of developers work on boring business software in Windows.

Why is it at every tech conference you see a vast preponderance of Mac's? Are conf goers not representative?

1. They're probably not representative

2. You probably notice macs more because of their uniform branding, compared to a mish-mash of different looking other laptops.

3. Is it not enough to watch and listen to a keynote without pulling out a laptop?

4. The Mac may be a "lie".

4a. Dual booted, is it running macOS, Linux, Windows, *BSD?

4b. Is it running a VM (or more than one)?

4c. Is it used as a very expensive terminal with SSH to a different *nix OS or a remote desktop system?

At various times, all those have been true of mine.

> Why is it at every tech conference you see a vast preponderance of Mac's? Are conf goers not representative?

The prevalence of MacBooks at tech conferences is in my experience a very US-centric thing. I rather associate ThinkPads with tech conferences.

I dunno, I kinda dislike Macs. At least Windows has the decency of not even pretending to be Unix-like. Other than the fact that it has a bash-like shell, and some token support for Posix APIs, the Mac is just as proprietary and opaque (I'd argue even more so) as Windows. At least Linux allows to poke around its innards and explore with nothing but a terminal.

Yeah and they have doubled down on things like the command key that inhibit adoption by wannabe former Windows users. NIH, or just plain cultural stubbornness prevents them from allowing the system to welcome new users. The Mac differences are not superior and it feels crusty and sub-par to me. However, the Mac doesn't track...so it wins. I bounce back and forth between Mac and Windows daily. I hate them both really.

> … Other than the fact that it has a bash-like shell, and some token support for Posix APIs…

Strongly recommend reading this response by Terry Lambert on getting OSX to POSIX compliance.

https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-an-OS-to-be-Unix...

Do they prefer or are they not given a choice?

As someone who has worked in large budget games for much of my career (where windows is everywhere) most of them prefer it.

As a counter point outside of gaming, I used to work for a Fortune 250 100+ year old banking firm, and you were given no choice. Heck it was a miracle if you could get a developer machine that was more powerful than your business users got.

> large budget games

no linux support on those games right? then there would be no option to use linux.

To be fair if you’re using a game engine such as Unreal I’d expect most of the game-specific programming to be against that (as an SDK) and it’ll abstract the platform specifics for you. Linux compatibility work, if even required (as in the builds produced by the game engine don’t work out of the box) would be separate from the actual game development work and can be assigned to Linux-specific engineers with their dedicated Linux machines.

I haven't worked in game Dev but I'd imagine that each person would want/require a copy of the game (dev-build, etc) that they could probably test their aspect of development in, which is highly likely going to only run the platform of which they're developing for.

Developing something for like Sony or Nintendo might be more OS agnostic in the developer's seat, but then it relies on the tools working on those OS's.

Windows is never really a choice, it's more "I choose X, which only works reliably on windows"

The games market for Linux is tiny. Usually not worth the cost for developers.

Now? Maybe not, even though it's hard to find exact numbers for that.

From 1995 until 2010, at least? For sure.

It was a crushing majority, even.

I assume someone would prefer developing on whichever machine they normally use.

I have been a windows user for a long time and recently started working on a mac to write some iphone code. It is agonizing, but presumably not because there is any problem with macs, but just because the systems are different. Using the cmd key instead of the ctrl is the most obvious difficulty, but I can't say that makes macs better or worse.

One thing that really got me while using the mac is I was adding a file to my project and I double clicked on a folder to navigate into it. Coming from a pc this is what you would do. You also do that on a mac in other places. But here it inserted the folder into my project. I won't get into what happened when I deleted the folder from my project.

Using a system you are not familiar with sucks, whether it is a mac or a pc.

Other than this, is there something I don't know that makes developing on a mac so much better?

...we fixed this, right? Good ole fellas at Red Hat yeah? And by kicking and screaming until corporate sent us some Macbooks.

...right?

This makes no sense to me, if business types care about their business data and thats why they use windows, why does the argument start off by pointing out that all the mission critical stuff like email and customer facing sites run on unix? Even Microsoft runs its mission critical stuff on unix.

Windows isn't popular because its good at anything its popular because windows it meets the bare minimum and has a huge marketing budget unix doesn't.

Windows is an ecosystem, linux is an OS... that's the difference. For the most part, Windows is far far easier to configure and maintain than linux based systems (and I say this as someone who runs a large enterprise system with Windows, Fedora, Debian, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, SoNIC, Dell OS10, MacOS, Azure... etc, all mixed together).

I would love for you to come work at my company when I was told I couldn't connect my Mac to the VPN "because the network can't support OSX" which is a sentence that doesn't even begin to make sense for me.

That's regular user speak.

The user won't care about intricacies, but they've heard of the words "network" and "support" and they'll understand the gist of the problem.

As an admin, if company policy doesn't forbid it, I'll help make it work. Blocking Mac users for no good reason is just being lazy...

"Windows" is a monolithic thing that can be referred to singularly, even across version. Unix is not. The first thing you need to decide if you want to switch to unix is "which distro," when Windows is the distro.

What windows? Datacenter? Essentials? Standard? which one do I need? will I be missing functions I later need? The answer to all of these questions is it probably doesn't matter that much as they all do the same thing.

What distro of linux / unix should you go for? FreeBSD? Fedora? Arch? It probably doesn't matter that much as they all do the same thing.

I get the idea, but it seems tragically misguided in some of the specifics. A lot of average developers can do REST (in the generic sense of JSON over HTTP) well. A lot of smarter-than-average people got mired in SOAP and ended up using a bunch of its features wrong and having integration nightmares with smart people in other departments or other companies who used a different subset of features wrong. The idea that SOAP's rich set of features would result in more secure, correct, and robust software compared to REST was a plausible, logical idea, but it was an idea that didn't pan out, especially for the 99% programmers who were so exhausted and behind schedule when they finally got their SOAP integration working that they couldn't bear to stop and ask themselves what further work they needed to do to reap the promised benefits.

Also, the idea that enterprise Windows business programmers were more into data integrity than the UNIX "Internet" programmers runs contrary to my experience seeing those two cultures encounter each other in the 2000s. In my experience, the former took human intervention for granted to handle unexpected or even routine-but-unusual cases, and the latter understood that their job was to build systems that could operate properly without humans constantly picking data up off the floor and dusting it off. The Windows programmers I worked with were great at creating rough-and-ready GUIs to help human employees do their jobs, honestly truly great at the "make users awesome" aspect of programming, but writing software that worked well enough to run without a human operator was just something they had never had to do. They couldn't understand why you were worried about some weird case that would mangle 0.1% of records, because in their mind that was the kind of thing that an expert user fixes up in Excel every Friday before the reports run over the weekend. A customer sends a payment after we've written off their debt? Never heard of that happening, but if it does, accounts receivable can escalate to Liz and she'll figure it out. February 29th? I think they know better than to run imports on a day like that, but to be safe, we'll remind them.

Those mushy "Internet" programmers inherited a legacy that was rooted in a requirement to be robust against nuclear war[1]. The mind boggling difference in ambition between surviving armageddon and "they know better than to run the software on February 29th, lol" made for a huge difference in culture and made me look up to the "Internet" programmers as intellectual role models while respecting the business-oriented Windows programmers as scrappy, context-sensitive, tactically oriented commandos.

[1] I'm not sure to what extent this was real, but the belief was real.