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Comment by epgui | Hacker News Reader

Speaking as someone who happily lives in the mac engineering bubble and has very little interest in leaving said bubble…

We tend to dramatically under-estimate the market share of Windows in engineering.

I have no trouble believing that most companies run Windows and develop on Windows. I just don’t particularly want to work for these companies.

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A lot of engineers who use windows aren’t programmers. This is because a lot of custom engineering packages that require windows, especially since they were developed 20 years ago when windows was dominate.

But programmers have many more choices, and visual studio shops aren’t very common anymore, at least in the developed world, and I would bet countries like Russia and China as well.

Quite a lot of programmers use windows, because they require less maintenance and there is no reason not to.

Are you sure any of the three major operating systems require much maintenance these days?

At least for linux, I would assume that it hugely comes down to how much of a personal statement the OS is to developers.

I use Arch btw.

Well, yes, "Linux" is not well-specified. When one installs Arch, they hopefully know what they want, and it's something else than just a low-maintenance casual desktop OS. :)

Mac’s don’t require much maintenance either, and last longer then Lenovo things. When I worked tech in Beijing already a lot of programmers used them, even in changping around Lenovo’s big R&D office.

You don’t have to be a Visual Studio shop to use Windows machines, just like you don’t need to be an Xcode shop to use Macs.

Sure, older tools are also feasible on windows. But if you are going with clang or GC, why bother? I guess you could do java dev on windows as well as other platforms.

There’s also the whole world of Java software and engineering which all pretty much Just Works on Windows.

Microsoft itself doesn't recommend that you deploy software on Windows servers anymore. It's something that is supported, not recommended.

What do those ellipses mean?

    When Shute uses three dots it means, "Use your own imagination. Conjure the scene up for yourself." (pause)

    Whenever I see three dots I feel all funny.

~ https://inkscrawl.blogspot.com/2005/01/whenever-i-see-three-...

~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfKvOlSJ77o

That's a great response. I unfortunately still just perceive end-of-phrase ellipses akin to a blank stare.

Or as a passive-aggressive suggestion that you're incorrect in whatever is being responded to.

Definitely no (positive) funny feelings.

There's only one, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis#In_writing

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