Who wants to use Windows? So now they are just repackaging open free software like npm and angular 2... Oh great... Again who wants to use Windows? Azure you can't even have it use anything that touches other servers without costing you. I think their focus on their base is what is hurting them. Sure they gained a little with azure but as tech people know, thatll be out if date if not already. Cause why learn how is all connected right?
I want to use Windows. No other OS has put the time and effort into ensuring stable, cutting edge support for the 3D graphics systems I need for my work.
Windows is still 90% of the PC market. If only 10% of those users are developers, that means there are more Windows developers than all macOS users combined. There are a lot of us out here, and I think we're starting to get fed up with being treated like we don't exist, just because of the shame that gets lumped on us from a small cohort of other developers.
They are not. That would mean that more than 10% of the people sitting on chairs in companies are doing software development. That would fail to take into account jobs that don't have a chair, every PC outside an office and even non technical jobs in sw development companies.
It's less than 1%, still much more than I would bet on. However I think that this figure is lower globally and Windows is sold globally. Hence, much less than 1% of PC users are software developers (Windows, Mac, Linux, anything) and having Windows the larger share its stats are close to the global figure.
If 1% of the desktop users are developers, that's the same as 50% of the Linux users, and a really big share of the Linux users are developers (really, I expected it to be more than 50% what, clearly isn't true). That's also circa 12% of the Mac users, and I bet a biggest share of them are developers than the Windows ones.
> That's also circa 12% of the Mac users, and I bet a biggest share of them are developers than the Windows ones.
That seems unlikely.
The fact that there are a number of programs without real non-Windows equivalents (games, emulators, various commercial packages) probably does suggest a lot of people doing Windows development.
It means that WayneBro conclusion up there is nonsense. You can't claim there are so few users of other OSes that it's impossible that most developers are on them.
It does certainly not mean that there are no Windows developer. That would just be repeating the same flawed argument, but twisted on the direction where it's the most flawed.
Meh. That stack overflow survey is definitely flawed. My conclusion is based on the fact that most businesses run Windows and as a consultant, I visit many many many enterprise shops. None of them are running Macs or Linux.
I'm probably in another country on another continent (Italy) but web development, both back end and front end, is a Mac business here. There are some Linux laptops (me too), many Linux VMs on Macs, very few Windows. But we're developing for Linux servers so why should we be using Windows? Every time I get to work junior devs out of university with Windows laptops I advise them to install a Linux VM or be prepared to suffer and google alone how to fix things there.
People are using Macs because it gives them a preconfigured and stable Linux like environment, almost 100% compatible with the server. Windows tend to have different toolings and different quirks. It doubles the effort. In my experience it's OK if you're using Java, which mostly hides the OS and it's obviously a must if you go with .NET. Basically only large companies use those two technologies, and not all of them. Everybody else is on scripting languages, JS, PHP, Python, Ruby. Btw, Java is almost always deployed to Linux too.
No, I'm not. My point is to only draw an illustration of just how small the overall marketshare for "non-Windows PC users" actually is. I go out to meetups all the time and everyone wants to act like I'm some sort of weird outlier because I'm the only person with a Windows machine in the room.
This is a fair point actually. I switched to the Mac a decade ago, but Mac hardware free-rides off the PC hardware market all the time. If we're honest, so does Linux. If Microsoft hadn't supported and grown the PC hardware industry for decades the whole desktop ecosystem would be a lot poorer.
Personally I'm very happy with the hardware options available to me on the Mac, but there's a whole world of hardware options over there in PC land I'll never take advantage of. Conversely Linux graphics card driver support is still woeful, but that's really not Microsoft's problem and if Linux didn't have the PC platform to run on it's hardware costs would be much higher. What would be the alternative, Sun-style workstations? It's not that Microsoft did this on purpose, but it's still a fact.
With no MicroSoft the PC industry would be as fragmented as it was in the 80s, with many operating systems and single vendor hardware/sw platforms running on different chipsets. We are down to Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android and iOS now, on either ARM or x86. Everything else is very minor.
However network effects would have given to another company the position that MicroSoft enjoyed for some 30 years. It could have been a slower growth or a faster downfall, but somebody would have been there. Not Apple because they are interested only in selling their own hardware. Probably some company out of nowhere, not necessarily on a x86 chip. Then everybody would have started building drivers for the OS of that company and Linux and MacOS would be running on the preferred chip of that OS.
Maybe in an alternate reality Visicalc built their own OS to run their spreasheet on a large screen (by the time standards) 8086 computer and replace MSDOS and Microsoft as the OS and sw company of choice. We'd be talking about VisiOffice and Vindows now :-)
> with many operating systems and single vendor hardware/sw platforms running on different chipsets.
We could have gone the slightly-less-compatible route with CP/M-86. Network effects would make the industry gravitate towards a standard platform, but not necessarily a company.
I remember tons of GUI software running on proprietary Unixes on vastly different architectures, all written aiming POSIX compatibility and an X graphics environment.
I remember them, but they cost a little fortune (both hw and sw). They were still popular in the 90s but the first cheap and good enough alternative started to make a real dent into their professional market. It was Windows 3.1 and 80486 in 1992. But don't forget Autocad in the 80s.
Yes, CP/M-86 could have played to role of MSDOS but people really needed to buy a box with a floppy disk to install from or a preinstalled OS on their new PC. MS did that right.
A 386 was a reasonable Unix host at the time. I first experienced Unix on a 68020 box attached to dozens of terminals. There were a couple Unix like OSs that were relatively inexpensive but I don't remember any that had a GUI.
All that is not very relevant. Had Microsoft never existed, it'd have been an ecosystem too different to make any valid prediction. We'll have to eventually restore the universe and run a different path to see.
> Maybe in an alternate reality Visicalc built their own OS to run their spreasheet on a large screen
Well, we did have Richard M. Stallman, Emacs author, not only create an OS (GNU), but also extend Emacs to the point that it might as well be an OS. More pointedly, Miguel De Icaza created Gnumeric (a fantastic Excel clone) before he started the GNU Network Object Model Environment (GNOME).
Corel attempted something similar to what you were saying, as well; Their Wordperfect/Office/Draw empire was leveraged against Microsoft's Embrace/Extend/Extinguish in order to promote their (debian-based) linux distribution.
Unless you're using Wayland on NVidia chipsets, graphics driver support is pretty damn good nowadays. I was able to install NVidia and ATI proprietary drivers during my graphical linux install of Calculate (Gentoo) linux. I'd be shocked if Ubuntu or Fedora were somehow more obtuse than this.
As for free drivers, the only one lagging behind is Nouveau for Nvidia users. AMD's free/open driver has made some serious performance improvements in the past few months, and Intel's driver (or just plain modesetting) has performance parity with their windows driver.
I remember 2008, and fighting with AMD/ATI drivers, and occasional reboots on my NVidia systems that led to X not working anymore. I've had exactly one instance of that in the past 4 years (under Arch). Can we stop spreading 2008-era misinformation in 2016?
My personal experience with OpenGL is that all Valve games run faster on it than on DirectX (both on Windows, but I heard Linux + OpenGL also has better perf than Windows + DirectX), but that's about the extent of it.
I feel like the video really really was based on faith that the future will just become more complex. This is prolly the number one reason why man doesn't progress as much as it should. It just presumes so much and yet so very little. It's like the whole AI taking over theory. Really really doesn't go well with people because it lacks complete and utter detail.
> I feel like the video really really was based on faith that the future will just become more complex.
Well as long as we keep churning out more coders and more code, it will! Automatically. Just by definition.
We're buffering some of that explosion & redirecting a lot of that complexity potential by evolving a relatively harmless "JS frameworks all the way down" song-and-dance. Turns out we don't need Basic Income, we can just have unlimited middlemen ("the service economy") multiply a single GDP-growing transaction into infinite GDP-growing transactions, and have infinite "creatives" each add their own unique superfluous additions of bits & bytes to infinite new numbers of "products & services". Who cares about "economical", prudent, frugal, there's too many pensions to save and nothing else can as credibly inflate into infinity as the digital "industries". Crikey, I'm railing off track here.
Ever more complexity, thus ever more fragility, ever more reproduction. Has been the name of the game since the coal age. Would have to happen this way with any brainy species ending up at the top of the foodchain sooner or later. Once you eat up your prey animals and go "civilized", the direction is irreversably set. But hey, Elon is gonna blow us into space so the future is as bright as the night sky :D
It's certainly based on empirical data, projections, and some model assumptions.
Urbanization: its drivers (jobs or other opportunities) and consequences (growth faster than the infrastructure or social structure can catch up), the demographic composition (a youth bulge with terrible consequences), the potential conflicts between ethnic and ideological groups etc., all that is known from what we observed so far and can be projected 15 years into the future.
Increasing complexity is a concern. But scale is the real killer. Who has the corresponding means to manage such numbers? They mentioned 100,000 of (potentially) revolting inhabitants in a city of 10 million (1%) as an example. How do you control them? Complexity means things become more opaque and surprising, uprisings have more hidden resources and connections, the criminal and other networks are harder to detect and contain.
It depends how much time you want to spend on it. If it's a simple app you'll never touch again then ms stuff is meant for turn and burn apps without learning anything.
If you want just Templating and always open connections for building backend site builder tools then PHP is your language.
If you want free and scalable with as little code as possible with building files you never have to write again then Python Django restful API and angular2.
If you plan for this to be worked on indefinitely and it'll be customized every day and you know the greatest will stay with you with high risk, then vanilla js and nodejs.
If you want as quick as possible but with a scalable price then reactjs and firebase.
I just stopped from the js community to the Python one cause of js fatigue and the first thing I learned is Django restful APIs and now this happens....
To be honest you should look into Python. It's really short code and getting very popular. It uses decorators and those template garbage %> that no one uses anymore (extra). It also is by default the cleanest code and in my opinion the shortest code. It also has a library for everything. It also is the fastest for big data crunching.
I don't think comparing a language to two backend and frontend frameworks makes much sense. Especially in the context of a tutorial about the frameworks (not an article evangelizing this particular stack). I mean, if someone posted a Django / react tutorial and I said "You should really look into Rust. There are benchmarks where it's faster than Python. It is also by default the cleanest code and in my opinion the best structured code.", it wouldn't be adding much to the discussion surrounding a tutorial. Is Python a better language than C#? Maybe, but that's not really something the tutorial is trying to argue against and is an entirely different discussion. To me, this is an apple and oranges comparison.
You know, yesterday by happenstance I read a blog post[1] comparing Python (favorably) to Java. It makes the same general arguments as you.
As for "really short code", yeah technically you write `[]` for a list instead of `new ArrayList()`. Unless of course you want different performance characteristics, then you have to write `from collections import deque` and `deque()` which isn't really more convenient or shorter than `new Deque()`.
And yeah you can use the global function `open` and the method `read` to quickly get file contents. But you can write wrapper functions around the Java or C# equivalents if needed. It's just that usually you need more fine-grained control over what's happening than that in real-world code.
And while I'm not really a fan of the `new` keyword or the fact that everything has to be within a class definition, a good IDE makes that stuff painless.
And it's true that you don't have to declare types in Python. But then you lose the ability to control-click a type name of a variable to go to its definition, to know what you can do with it or how it works.
As for "cleanest" code, that's definitely not a matter of syntax or even what the standard library looks like. Clean code can be written in any language. I've seen clean code in Ruby, Python, Haskell, Clojure, Java, C#, Swift, Objective-C, heck even C. (Never C++ though, but I don't doubt it probably exists somewhere.)
As for having libraries for everything, so does every major language, including the ones I just mentioned.
And I sincerely doubt that Python is the fastest for big data crunching. From what I've read, the situation is more like, Python is very popular among data scientists, but they got fed up with how slow it is in general, especially at numbers, so they wrote a Python library for number crunching implemented in C to make it really fast, and now it's like as fast as Java finally.
