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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I come from a weird world, or even a weird generation. But when I was in high school, Linux fanboyism was at its peak and just like people get all wound up on bands and such, us geeks got wound up on open-source and linux and fck Micro$oft etc. etc. This was early-ish 2000's.

As a result. Every serious programmer I know, especially those who are about my age, lives their life in the CLI.

It always comes a surprise when somebody suggests that there are professional developers out there who do not use predominantly CLI.

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This shouldn't be a surprise. Tons of development is done on Windows. Most game development, obviously Windows app development, .NET websites, etc.

There are command line tools there, but in my 10 years of being a Windows developer, GUI tools were more the norm.

There's a time and a place for both. Now developing predominantly under Linux, it amazes me how time consuming and clunky some tasks are on the command line compared to using a GUI (e.g. debugging, Visual Studio is just a fantastic IDE), but also how much faster and easier other tasks are with a CLI.

Windows is just inherently GUI-centric, if you force developers to use Windows they are naturally going to gravitate toward using GUI based tools because Windows command line is so crippled. Tools like Cygwin and Chocolatey are nice in a pinch but they just don't compare to being in a real UNIX environment.

Windows Powershell is actually quite nice and powerful, while also avoiding some of the shell legacy traps around escaping. It suffers from not being very discoverable and not having a community.

Yeah, so installing Cygwin and/or gnuwin is just a lot faster than learning how to invoke "CLR objects" from the command line...

I wish they had just been less stubborn and made something that would run bash and standard unix commands. I've used it for production jobs and it's worked as advertised, but I would have rather have just had bash.

A lot of bash is using awk, sed, cut, tr and others to munge the output of one command into the input of another. The killer feature of Powershell is that it does away with all of that.

.. having advertised Powershell upthread, I found it fell on its face at the last hurdle. I wanted to grep a file, and discovered that the default output formatters will either truncate or wrap lines, even when directed into a file. This is wrong and destroys data. I ended up with

Select-String " 23:56.00" -Path .\input.txt | ForEach-Object { Write-Output $_.Line } | Out-File outpu.txt

Because there are a lot of shitty things about bash, too, that anybody with half a brain would think should be blindingly simple from the command line. For example, add a virtual host to apache with an Allow for localhost on /var/www/localtest. And do it in a portable way, i.e. no 'put every vhost in a separate file and Include those. Or fetch a configuration parameter from another machine and that other machine might run any of 5 different distros. The list goes on and on - look I'm no PowerShell fan, or 'real' user even, but we have to admit that the old Unix approach is reaching EOL (well I should say 'it should reach EOL', unfortunately it seems like it's not going to go away soon, with there not even being an alternative).

They weren't stubborn, they set out to "give windows a Unix command line" but then they discovered how unsuitable a Unix command line is, and had to rethink.

See the original lead architects comments here: http://stackoverflow.com/a/573861

It also has a surprising number of WTFs, which was a great disappointment to me because it really seemed like MS had done scripting better. Of course, later versions fix some of the pitfalls if you use them right, but then you need to make sure you're always running machines that will have the latest Powershell on them.

(And, of course, it would have been nice if they could improve its interactive use to even be on par with the Unix shells of the 80s)

Why use a loaded word like 'force'? Developing on Windows was excellent. Microsoft provides great tools and support; it was incredibly productive. The only real negative is the licensing requirements.

As of 2011 (I couldn't find more recent data publicly available) Windows was far and away the most popular development environment. http://www.cnet.com/news/coders-choosing-mac-os-over-linux-e...

It's interesting to see the culture of development differ so much from place to place. When I worked in Australia, Windows was an incredibly common development environment, while here in Silicon Valley it's all Mac/Linux.

> The only real negative is the licensing requirements

Fix: Some of the real negatives are:

* the licensing requirements,

* lack of virtual desktops,

* having to manually update everything except the office suite and the OS itself

* having to use a different platform than what is used in production

* many standard tools works slower / is less tested / etc

(PS: I'm working happily from a Windows workstation now.)

> lack of virtual desktops

They're not built in, but a few of my colleagues use Dexpot and like it: http://www.dexpot.de/index.php?lang=en

Also note, if I'm remembering correctly, there are native virtual desktops slated to come with Windows 10. Kinda late to the game, but it's nice that they're finally getting them.

Windows does have virtual desktops...just not the way X allows. The main thing that bugs me about Windows's desktops is that it is given a logical display surface compromised of all the display units. Whereas with X (going by my use of xmonad) it's easy to separate the display and desktop abstractions and have desktop 2 on display 1 and desktop 5 on display 2.

There's a nice overview of the limitations and intentions of the Windows model here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms68...

When on windows, I've been using this (it crashes sometimes, but only itself, never takes other programs with it): https://github.com/Tzbob/python-windows-tiler

> Why use a loaded word like 'force'?

Because a lot of us would always pick alternatives when there's a choice. In fact, some of us won't take jobs where we have to develop on Windows.

Yes, but my point was that there is no evidence that is the majority, nor are they really 'forced' to use it - if it's that much of an issue, just don't take the job (as you say).

Many, many developers have no issue developing on Windows or even enjoy it. There seems to be a mindset amongst certain people that Windows developers are not 'real' developers, which is what I'm arguing against.

I say "force" because a lot of employers simply do not allow developers to choose their workstation OS. Windows is very popular with the non-programmers responsible for making IT purchasing deals within most major corporations. Among programmers, it's not quite so popular.

It still depends on what programmers you ask. Windows works fine for me, Linux did not work well when I tried it (but it was many years ago). Unix through XWindows from a pc was actually quite nice. I think developers like users use feelings more than thoughts when choosing an environment. Yes, you can do some things on Linux that are harder on Windows but saying that missing "grep" is severly limiting you is strange since it is easy to install. And you have find in most editors. You can run Vim or Emacs if you want to on Windows. Powershell is very good but with a strange syntax. If that is someones problem they sound like they don't want to learn something new. Listing thousands of files in a folder is probably still faster on Linux but I rarely do that (I can't see the point in collecting many years of logs in one folder, for example). The main problem I have with Windows is that I have to restart the computer every now and then.

Yes, the way Windows locks shared DLLs and requires a restart of the whole OS instead of just the programs currently using the DLL when you install an update is, in a word, obnoxious.

Also, again I dislike the fact that Windows is inherently GUI-centric. Interacting with programs is designed to be done using primarily the mouse or a touch screen. Even Windows Server is designed to be used via remote desktop. Whereas for UNIX-compliant OSes the desktop and mouse are not required for anything, a skilled user can easily be more productive using only a keyboard, and anything a user can do can just as easily be placed in a script and automated.

Package management is also a major deficiency of Windows. Chocolatey is a nice workaround, but is a relatively young project. Windows did not have any package management for a long time.

Also for a lot of programming language packages with native code extensions, it can be difficult or even impossible to get them to compile on Windows. I can think of a handful of Ruby packages that flat-out do not compile, making Rails dev on Windows a non-starter.

> Developing on Windows was excellent. Microsoft provides great tools and support; it was incredibly productive.

I don't know about that. I've made several good faith efforts to really see what people like about the Windows development ecosystem, and I consistently come away dismayed. "Great tools and support" could never be used to describe msbuild, for example. Or any of the MSDN documentation with incredible antipattern code that people like to blithely copy and paste into their programs. Visual Studio is slow, brittle, and makes it difficult to do version control right.

I could list examples for days but that's not the point. Nowhere is perfect, but there's no way anyone could consider Microsoft a clear leader here.

People are always surprised when I mention that the Microsoft devs I worked with had free access to the highest tiers of Visual Studio, yet what they actually worked in was vim and the internal fork of make. I don't know whether that's still true; it's been a decade now.

When you say "Microsoft Devs", do you mean MS employees?

If so I heard s similar tale back in the first days of .net, where most of the guys in one particular group were using emacs.

When I was an MS dev (8 to 18 years ago), Visual Studio had nothing to do with "real work" on Windows systems programming.

Quite a few people used a rather obscure editor called Source Insight (http://www.sourceinsight.com/) because of its code-navigation abilities, which were similar to an IDE's but worked on huge codebases that would take hours to actually parse and analyze "properly". Sort of a supercharged ctags.

It's still true (source: Microsoft engineer for 8 years, used vim and internal version of Unix tools).

A lot of this has to do with the sheer size of many of Microsoft products' codebases. Visual Studio just can't handle projects with millions of lines of code, whereas vim + ctags elegantly handles the fragments of projects you build locally.

15 years ago when i first started programming i learned on the *nix CLI. I worked that way for years, thats just how it was done. Well, I started using an IDE in windows and now.... I really like it. I don't want to go back to the command line. That being said, I still use the Windows command line from time to time.

Yeah me too. I do quite a bit of 'bit bigger than average' data processing, and I write the tools in cmd.exe or as command line C++ applications first - and then when they work and I need to run them more often than a few times, I made a small GUI in front of it so that I don't have to spend half an hour every time to set up the parameters right.

Can confirm, was there in high school at the same time and had the same experience :-)

I still use programming languages like AWK to this day (I even list it as a known language on my resume; someone commented on it once, it's always a +1 for the company if they do). Recently though I've been exposed to some stuff in the Windows world that makes me think that, sure, they evolved slower but they evolved in a really interesting direction and possibly pulled themselves out of the local maxima that is the Unix world. (I'm referring to PowerShell.)

It's a little weird to me when devs don't immediately go to the command line, given that's just how I learned, but you've gotta recognize that it's not a flaw that they don't. Everyone just learned a little differently.

Every serious programmer I know, especially those who are about my age, lives their life in the CLI.

This is not even close to true. Of the developers that I know, many of them quite serious, live in the Windows world, and are very happy with for example VS or eclipse. This is very likely to be the case in most BFEs.

> Every serious programmer I know

So, you know all the same programmers the parent poster knows? The parent explicitly stated that this was anecdotal, and from (not your) personal experience.

Indeed, there is a part of me that hurts when people mention teaching something that is a signifier of legitimacy. As if you could fake being a real programmer by listening to a lecture in CS 102!

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