Hacker News Reader

Comment by andymoe | Hacker News Reader

It's really only required for iOS/Mac development. The hardware is solid and you don't often have to think about it but I think OS X is a hinderance and a time sink for serious programming work outside of the platform specific stuff.

It's especially painful (subjective) to, for instance, get a rails dev or any number of other environments up and running and it's really annoying to do some embedded systems work on macs. (I say this as someone who makes his living developing iOS apps on a mac right now btw)

View on HN

I'm not sure if we mean the samething by "embedded systems work", however I've generally found embedded work to be far easier on OSX thanks to the unix udnerpinnings. There may be some troubles if you need a serial connector, in my case we were able to push new binaries to the HW over the network so we didn't need a serial connection much. Also, there are USB serial adapters that have become necessary even on windows machines (Less HW being made with serial adapters) (I say this as someone who just left a job working on consumer electornics device firmware for 5 years).

Now, I suspect linux is even easier for embedded work.

Serious Question: Isn't it hardest to get ruby/rails running on Windows?

Not anymore: http://rubyinstaller.org/

can't beat rvm. Run 3 commands and its done. Automated.

Lazy people can just use the rails version preinstalled on macs (though that's like 2.something)

>It's really only required for iOS/Mac development.

Really? I program in HTML5/JS, PHP, Java, C and Python, but also need to do multimedia work.

That is, besides doing web or desktop programming, you also need to create and/or embed to your work bitmap and vector graphics, stuff for print, edit video and music, etc?

Now, you might never have to do anything but pure programming with no multimedia, BUT, what about also using the same computer as a home computer? I for one would want to be able to edit my personal videos, watch any kind of multimedia with first class support, etc. I also have sequencing as a hobby, which requires stuff like Logic, Cubase, Live, Reason or Pro Tools.

I said it's only required for iOS/Mac development. I was obviously not speaking to your set of personal hobbies but only answering the question that was asked and providing my viewpoint.

Yes, Mac can be convenient for multimedia work but again not required by any means and for some projects the Mac does get in the way. (And yes embedded systems stuff is a lot easer on Linux than mac for the most part)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com