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Comment by knowtheory | Hacker News Reader

I recall speaking at a multi-language conference in Montreal two years ago. At a speaker dinner, i ended up talking with a .NET developer who was talking about a new(ish) and awesome tool that Microsoft had developed that allowed folks to easily manage syncing whole directory trees between computers, he reported.

"Oh, that's neat, so like rsync?" I queried.

"I'm not sure I've heard of rsync." he replied.

That was the point at which I realized that the .NET and windows FOSS development world is a parallel universe that bears no resemblance nor common root to the rest of the FOSS universe.

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'Oh that's neat so Puppet's kinda like Group Policy?"

"I'm not sure I've ever heard of Group Policy"

It cuts both ways. There's an infinite number of things to learn and a finite amount of minutes in a day. People that are too broad and know everything may never end up developing a deep understanding of a few things to be really productive.

There are certainly people that can straddle both worlds of *nix and Windows, but really how is a user of Microsoft's cozy development ecosystem any different than a user of Apple's cozy ecosystem? People seem to love the latter's setup but chastize the former.

Hey man, no judgement. I think it's great that the Microsoft ecosystem has developed a FOSS culture. There's not much point to saying "hey OUR FOSS community was first!" other than to say "the world you grew up in is not adjoined to the world i grew up in."

I'd also disagree with your assessment of Mac users. I would go so far as to say that so few people deploy to mac servers, that I can say "nobody deploys to mac" and no one would contradict me. All mac devs have to have at least a passing knowledge of linux.

A consequence of that is that mac using devs bump into (and have to rely upon) linux devs for expertise.

It also works the other way around. Async APIs have been standard in .NET for years, C#'s async support is much better than Javascript's. It would be great if both communities would learn more from each other.

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