Luckily with ruby you dont have to care much about windows linux or macosx. I still hope for a real empowered rubyOS one day. One from humans, for humans.
But at the time being, and even though I dont like DHH at all (people and egos just annoy me…) I must say I whole agree with the statement that windows is suboptimal.
No, lets be honest: Windows just plain sucks.
I am using my own ruby-shell on windows and it helps a lot, but lets face it - windows is so crippled, even using a lot of open source tools, it makes it better… but under the hood it just still sucks.
@ Reg:
On to another topic… What is this Samurai Showdown? And where can I try it??
Samurai Shodown (omit the W, it’s probably a translation goof just like “VICTOLY”) is a game for the Neo Geo system, which back then was the only thing that had hardware equal to what they had in the arcade. Several SNES and Genesis games of that time were arcade ports, but the arcade versions looked better since they had better hardware. You need to get an emulator and the game’s ROM to play it.
Since all Neo Geo games of that time are known, the emulator has a list of what’s possibly available, and the entire package (all games + emulator) can usually be had by perusing the BitTorrent system.
People get them because they think they themselves are cool and want to stand out from the crowd. Not realising people from street cleaners to board room directors of boring corporations have them now too.
I remember seeing an advert for a car - Toyota I think - and it’s tag line was “stand out from the crowd”. Carpark full of black cars, one person has silver car. Now if you go into a car park everyone has a silver car because they want to stand out from the crowd
Really though, an operating system is a tool for a job, it shouldn’t be a status symbol or an “exclusive/inclusive” babdge.
I work for a company that writes a windows based application. The application is limited to Windows for a couple of very good reasons, the first and foremost being: it’s what 98% of our target customers will run.
I think writing software is all about eating your own dogfood–if the application you’re working on runs on *nix, you’d best get your ass off the Redmond crack. If your target application is Windows, you should know Win32 like the back of your hand.
Our application runs on Windows XP, Vista, etc, so the notion of developing on *nix is silly. I have installs of XP, Vista, and Windows Home Server, among other things. Why? Because this is the domain in which my software resides. I did not have the luxury of selecting this software; it is simply the way things are.
Do I like *nix? Oh sure. Love it. Think it’s great. I would (and do) happily run a *nix desktop, participate in open source projects, etc. But I’m not here to be an evangelist: I’m here to produce software for a customer, and that customer doesn’t have the foggiest idea what a shell is, how to use vi, whether or not rails is the best thing since sliced bread, or what Ubuntu is. They simply don’t know, and they definitely don’t care.
Eat your own dog food. If that dog food is made by Linus, so be it. If it’s made by Bill, super. But be damn sure you’re not in the cat food isle if that isn’t what your customer wants or needs.
Got it - open source “you’re either with us or against us”
When will these open source zealots get that they’re competing with piracy, not with microsoft. Piracy (obviously) is winning heavily, so people start using much stronger words. Crime is what’s “keeping open source down”, not microsoft.
Good luck (heh), well, since this is never going to fly anyway, perhaps I should simply say enjoy the fight, since you can’t win as long as you’re against enforcing the law.
I develop web applications better than 90% of other “web developers” out there, and I do it using a windows platform. I don’t mind being arrogant in an anonymous setting, my own knowledge of my product speaks for itself, and I do not need to justify with an example, take that as you would like to. If I switched to another platform or language, given a short training period, I would be as effective of a developer. The developer makes the web application, not the platform. The developer also makes the money, not the platform. Last time I checked, where I am in my career, and my target demographic, I can make more money as a windows .NET developer. That may change, and if it does, I will go to that technology. You will never be an effective developer if you are tied to a single OS/Language/Technology. :End arrogant rant:
I would refuse to work for or with a narrow minded person like that. Odds are the douchebaggery doesn’t stop at the fanaticism of an operating system and language of choice, but spills over to other aspects.
But it’s easier to simply ignore the arrogant web-developers who basically scale up blogging software or CMS tools. They are the teenagers of the developing world, even though many of them older than I am, and stuck thinking they have figured out what the rest of the world is clueless about.
