Escape from Microsoft bubble
blooki.st
blooki.st
Personally I can't stand Windows for web development (although Node looks awesome in VS), but there's advantages to both. The author seems to express regret and a feeling he missed out, but would he have become a better developer for embracing the alternatives he mentioned? Would he really have been able to get his work done better and more efficiently? He didn't provide any evidence of this.
The one thing you save with the MS stack is time spent choosing and evaluating tools, you just pick whatever MS is offering.
The particular thing about the Microsoft bubble/sphere is that it acts like a very overly attached parent that does everything for the kid (developer) and really can make them successful within their realm. But the nix/open other bubbles are where programmers have to know more, be more manual and be more independent. It is more of a street knowledge type game where the Microsoft bubble is the scheduled childhood. On the extreme, developers in Microsoft bubbles (or other bubbles for that matter Rails, Node.js) are like cults/religions.
There are good and bad sides to this type of approach to developers on a platform. They'll constantly look to Microsoft for solutions rather than independent open source ones (changing a bit but only recently). It is easy to see why companies like using this tech.
Now with overlay attached or strict parents, sometimes the kids when they see the real world, they run for the hills.
s/Visual Studio/emacs/g
s/MSSQL/Sleepycat/g
s/C[#]/emacs lisp/g
Disclosure: I work at MSFT, but I just thought this was fun.
Just choose the language/technology of your choice.
That's the top of the iceberg.
I think OP biggest problem is the fact that he used only the "main" (as "more common") tools of his os, ignoring that you can easily run almost any tecnology stack over it without the need of change the os itself
That last one is especially frustrating because I'll spend three hours getting tool XYZ to compile on cygwin, and then just when the finish line is in sight I find "BTW /dev/null is unsupported in cygwin, and tool XYZ cannot run without it". I mean, /dev/null is supported, that's just an example- it's always something fundamental that you would never imagine doesn't work.
The fact that is a "second class citizen" does not mean that it is less usable than in linux/unix, obviously if we exclude the first workarounds to make it works
Realizing I could have as many OS's as I wanted was part of why Linux feels like the good parts of DOS - it reminded me that it's my computer to do whatever I want with. Don't get me wrong, nothing against Windows I'm just headed back to my roots and WIMP interfaces have outlived their attraction even if Metro is a great improvement.
Of course, not always, depends on you, depends on your employer, depends on luck, but this is just my perception from working in software companies for most of the last 30 years.