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Comment by robmcm1982 | Hacker News Reader

robmcm1982

I am disappointed by this article. It made such a big deal about PG hating to work with Windows, and reduced the innovation of web applications to a way to not work in Windows.

Really?

Clearly the whole point was to get away from developing desktop applications, and realizing the single-source, rapid development nature of web apps.

Please don't tell me that developing client apps on Windows was so much worse then doing it on Linux. Its bullshit. Overfocusing on this aspect of the story feels like platform fanboyism, misses the real point, and just overall kind of cheapens PG's stellar image.

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Actually it was no exaggeration.

I'm curious, does anyone use Unix for day to day use anymore? Or have Linux, OS X, and other Unix-like systems taken over the hacker preference?

Actually, OS X 10.9 was certified as UNIX by the OpenGroup (as were earlier versions such as OS X 10.6):

  http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3602.htm

> Please don't tell me that developing client apps on Windows was so much worse then doing it on Linux.

- Many Windows-only concepts (registry) hold key configuration data.

- Lack of a proper command line environment (somewhat covered by Cygwin, but not ideal). PowerShell is interesting, but, again, is very alien to non-Windows tools.

- No select-middle-click copy/paste (it's an incredible time-saver).

- Limited number of available languages and tools and the difficulty of integrating them (you have to add every install directory to PATH - unless you are running Cygwin).

- Case-insensitive filesystem (and some subtle bugs that it allows).

- It's almost impossible to open a tempfile and delete it while you still have the file handle.

- No package management (you can't just "yum install" what you need)

- No package management (you have to bundle every dependency with your installer)

It's not bullshit. Unless you are developing for Windows only, developing under Windows is quite painful.

In 1995 it would have made no sense to develop a commercial desktop app for anything other than Windows.

If you didn't make Windows apps at the time, it probably seemed really complicated. It really wasn't. Most of the issues were with C/C++, and the complexity that brings. VB and Delphi were decent alternatives -- there were some 4G languages that worked ok as well.

Making viaweb a web-app instead is obvious in retrospect. But not because making Windows apps is so hard -- it's the deployment that the web brings, not the ease of development. In 1995, there was no super-easy way to make web-apps -- PG and RTM had to invent that too.

Have you ever worked with MFC or Win32 GUI API proper? I have, and I can't imagine anyone who'd want to go back to those days.

Well, actually I used to develop UI intensive MFC applications for quite some years, and absolutely loved it! Not that different from developing for Android, and as I remember it the Visual Studio was (may be still is? haven't used it for years) a far better development environment back then than the Android Studio is today. But may be I just remember being 10 years younger :) Disclaimer - I'm still a Windows user.

Please don't tell me that developing client apps on Windows was so much worse then doing it on Linux.

Uh, what Linux? No, pg worked on Lisp Machines before, and that's why Windows were hurting him so much.

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