And when calling one person out includes describing Rails and OS X as “the platform of choice for douchebags,” I have trouble understanding the fine distinction between whatever David did or didn’t say three years ago and what this post is saying today.
You’re right – I forgot about that statement. That was certainly as uncalled for as what DHH says.
And of course, I have difficulty distinguishing between my comment here and Jeff’s post–if I wanted to take the High Moral ground, I would have given Jeff my feedback privately!
Well, I think you may be taking scruples a bit far here – I think it’s healthy to disagree in public, though as I said above, I think it went over the line here on the point you called attention to.
It is creepy if you group OS fanatics with religious persons.
Both trying to sell something that is pure ‘user’ preference.
Members from the Church of Linux screaming blasphemy every time someone loads Windows.
Wow. This is actually really hard for me to write as due to your over opinionated, banal and simplistic writings in the past I have always considered you a bit of a douchebag.
This article, although is starting to change my mind. I found myself in almost complete agreement with what you have written.
“Which also means when you’re using Rails and OS X, you’re using the platform of choice for douchebags.”
Oh give me a break. Dude, I personally dislike using Macs (the internals of that OS are … a quagmire). I have had … well… let’s call them “interesting” experiences with Rails apps. Despite my displeasure with both systems, to say that it’s the platform of choice for a douchebag is just flat out inflammatory.
As I said on your last blog post, you are becoming more and more like a muckraker. I can’t exactly pinpoint where you went from blogger to pundit, but I gotta say, the change does not look good on you.
Follow the money. That’s what it is all about. Rants like this one are pointless. We work in the environment that pay the bills. The tools aren’t important. The results of our efforts are. You must have jumped out of bed on the wrong side. Proving that one operation system or programing language if better than another is pointless.
Programming on Windows using open source technologies is at an objective, technical disadvantage to OS X and Linux. Try to make Git work in windows, or see how screwed up vanilla SVN can get on a Windows box. Try to run apache on windows, when you need to compile modules. Cygwin is a mediocre experience at best. Try to get X11 working in a stable way because you need kcachegrind to do performance metrics. Developing in Unix, especially for web applications, it at such a HUGE advantage because the production environment is Unix, that this whole “it’s all personal preference” stuff is total BS. There are huge parts of the production stack that are demonstrably inferior while running on Windows.
Whether OS X is easier to use, or more aesthetically pleasant, or whether there is more innovative shareware running on it (think omnigraffle, omnifocus, quicksilver, etc.) – this is all subject for debate (although I believe a fair analysis will show it’s not equally balanced pros and cons, one is superior). And that’s not to say that windows has nothing going for it. I mean, C# and F# are both interesting languages and LINQ is ridiculously awesome. But give me a break - it’s “all a matter of personal preference” is the often last resort of someone committed to something inferior.
If you were a douchebag, your platform and programming language of choice would be Rails on a mac. But just because you program in Rails on a mac, doesn’t necessarily make you a douchebag.
He made a good point, just pointing out the common trolling. I own a macbook one windows pc for gaming and another laptop for my linux pleasure. I enjoy all of the different os’s. At work I do IT for windows. When I feel like coding and not using a script I use linux. When I want to surf the web and do chat and music I do mac. They are all great for what they are. I don’t think one enviroment is better then the other. In this day in age and in any IT center I think you need good experience on all systems. Os X wouldnt be as fun for me if I hadn’t develed into linux first.
Interesting. In 2005, Dave was clearly a few years behind. This decade has seen such a massive, overwhelming explosion of free and Open software and tools for Windows, and indeed all major platforms, that his standpoint is simply untenable.
A good programmer gets things done no matter what his tools are – the best programmers get things done in SPITE of their tools.
In my opinion, the guy expressed the same opinion you expressed in your posting on 11/25/07 “The two types of programmers”. This is all about “I am better than you”.
Does this make you a hypocrite?
boring. this is classic dhh, and by classic i mean old. this was ages ago. get with the times…
speaking of the times, it’s 2008. the fact that a) the best version of windows around is from 2001 and b) the development tools for it are like having metal spikes on your keys really makes what dhh says hard to argue with.
obviously you need to take his comments in context, he’s talking about web development… so that leaves out ‘applications’ in the traditional sense. and when looking at it that way, well… let’s just say that while he wouldn’t hire a windows web programmer - i would agree in that i would definitely not take a job for a company that was run by windows people either.
it’s no shocker that apple sucked and linux wasn’t ready for all of the 90’s, but really, it’s time to give in here people… gaming is done on consoles, web stuff is platform independent - essentially, if you aren’t (as dhh says) stuck doing windows development for some backwards corporation then lets get all these wars over with!
it’s nothing like coke vs pepsi, it’s like all of the sudden your t-shirts aren’t made out of paper anymore, now it’s fabric! remember the day you got your first scroll-mouse? yea, like that. you can justifiably say that your scroll-wheel mouse is better than the old non-scroll-wheel mouse… for anything that requires scrolling! and that’s exactly what’s happening here. any platform is better for web development than windows at this point.
i once tried to update a client site using one of their in-office windows boxes, i fiddled with putty and ie6/some freeware garbage ftp program and other stuff for an hour, told the client i wasnt going to charge them for that and i’d be right back. half an hour later i was doing the work on my laptop in their office with much less of a headache. it’s as simple as that… and, yea, yea, what a fanboy, etc… but i only switched, as dhh also mentions, in 2005 - and, believe me, for good reason - and to my benefit.
I totally disagree with everything in this Post, except the last part - the samurai showdown metaphor
I am a very long time windows user
I recently installed Ubuntu and made me comfortable with it’s file system and package management system for starters. Everyone who saw both worlds must confess that the windows part is inferior here. Yea it works… MAYBE even faster, but as a programmer transparency and clean design are more important to me. And that’s where UNIX shines IMHO. Nearly everything is configurable in a simple text file, stored in mostly logically places. The Windows Registry is binary and only viewable with a GUI tool.
And yea, all programming languages are theoretically equal in power, and propably the best coder in C# is as good as the best coder in Ruby. But at the end of the day, I bet, that the Ruby guy was more productive AND had more fun!
I came from Java, and Ruby is so much better to write (read: cleaner, less code, more self documenting)! Sure every language/OS has it’s advantages, but i’ll sure stick to Ruby/Unix instead of Java/Windows, if I can!
And last but not least: Why do a lot of people just don’t get DHH? I read a lot about him beeing arrogant and stuff. I went through some of the actual posts/interviews/presentations and really can’t understand that. Actually that “Fuck you”-thing was really funny.
Yeah, I’m getting a bit sick of this shit, too, and I hate doing dev work on Windows.
I’m currently doing RoR work on linux because despite the huge Mac following I’m not actually that interested in switching over.
“It just works” is a decent statement to make about Mac when it comes to average home use, but it has some major shortcomings for serious development work.
Rails devs won’t come up against a lot of these due to massive support for the platform from the ruby and rails world, but venturing outside of these can be a real pain in the arse. Although support of unix OSS is touted hugely by many switchers, if you’re using anything particularly new it’s likely that the darwin ports are going to be well behind the ones available in almost any linux distro’s default repository (Haskell, for instance, requires all kinds of dicking around on OSX, but has nice, up to date packages for linux).
If you really care about the tools you use you’ll actually evaluate them rather than looking for some sort of panacea. Fuck you DHH.