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Comment by eli | Hacker News Reader

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eli·

all but extinct

Microsoft Visual Studio seems to be doing OK

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yeah, but can you name many others?

Coda is doing well, and Espresso had a pretty big release recently.

This is an outlier, since the Windows stack is so closed in general. I think a large number of VS users use it because they are forced to by their environment choice (or employer).

I tend to think of editors like TextMate, emacs, and vim to be chosen by people who invest some thought into making the decision, rather than by people that are forced to use something for work.

Perhaps it's an outlier in that the language is more closed than most (and that this gives MS a pretty huge advantage over other IDE makers), but VS really is the best environment for developing .NET. That's why people pay for it, not because management forced it on them.

The question then is, "Why the closed .NET stack" and not Java or Mono.

> since the Windows stack is so closed in general

Huh? What about NetBeans or Eclipse? There is tons of open software for Windows.

One example in a sea of corpses...

Xcode is doing decently well too... And TextMate or CSSEdit or Coda or Espresso or BBEdit...

The "Open source killed closed source" argument doesn't really apply to Mac OS X. Sure, there's Smultron or MacVim or Aquamacs, but they're not really the most popular of text editors (looking at GUI-based ones).

yeah, but can you name many others?

"All but extinct" is a little strong. That's all I'm saying. A few million people paid bug bucks for Visual Studio.

XCode

I guess the proprietary stacks use proprietary editors, and the open stacks tend to use open editors.

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