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Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely agreed.

As a rule of thumb, Windows devs are mentally locked into Visual Studio and GUIs. They do not want to touch the command line. Open source scares them because it's libre & free. It's like some freaky movie where the Alien Software got downloaded into human brains and started issuing commands.

It's like some of these guys don't do computer programming any more. They program Visual Studio using C#. Of course, Visual Studio ain't bad, but the Visual Studio users are pretty rabid.

They would fork over thousands for their addiction.

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I disagree. Your points are not substantiated and are attacking fellow programmers.

I know many programmers (myself included) who have programmed and are reasonably competent in different languages using different text editors and IDE's on different operating systems and have made a conscious decision to use Visual Studio because, well, it is the tool that allows them to be the most productive. Companies choose Visual Studio because it allows their teams to be most productive.

I find myself using VS more and more for personal projects, as I haven't found anything that can beat the combination of F# and C# when used from VS. The .NET framework and languages have seen the introduction of some really exciting stuff such as LINQ, Reactive Extensions etc. etc. which are all supported by VS and offer more than enough for developers to keep interested in the platform.

That has not been my experience at all, even at primarily Windows targeting shops. Yes, Windows devs do love Visual Studio for intellisense and debugging. However, the few that I've met that weren't competent with gcc/cygwin/ssh/git/cmake/&c were more embarrassed about it than anything else.

Your "rule of thumb" is a pretty rash generalization. I use Visual Studio because I have a Windows machine, and on this platform it's the best tool for the job I'm doing. I am primarily a C++ developer, both at my day job and on my own projects. I got started using vim, gcc and make. I am perfectly comfortable on a Unix terminal, but I avoid terminals on Windows because - and maybe you've noticed - Windows terminals are dreadful.

Here's a rule of thumb for you: Good developers use the best tool for the job without getting religious about platforms.

This is a terrible rule of thumb. You sound very out of touch.

Upvoted for a skilled application of poe's law.

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