Why I develop on Windows(blog.shortround.dev)

120 pointsby shortrounddev3 anni fa184 comments

blog.shortround.dev

https://blog.shortround.dev/why-i-think-windows-is-the-best-dev-platform/

186 comments

lucb1e3 anni fa

> I know a lot of developers who will opt to do all of their scripting in python these days, even putting #!/bin/python3 at the head of a script so that it runs through the shell.

...which is exactly what you're meant to do.

This is not an example of how bad Bash it, it shows that you didn't understand what Bash is. It's expected to use various languages to write code on Linux, nobody wants you to do things in a language that wasn't made for the task.

Imagine you had to use Python on the shell and, any time you open a terminal, needed to import os and do something like print(os.path.glob("*")) instead of just opening a terminal and typing "ls" to get your directory listing. Different tools for different jobs.

Also the point they try to make about bash looking like a foreign language and having weird syntax. Yes, that's the thing: it's a very specific thing called a shell, not just any old programming language that you're meant to use for things that are not shell scripts. If Python feels more natural to you, that's probably what you should be using. Don't feel like you need to use Bash for bigger tasks than a few lines of code for no reason other than because you're on a system that has it.

lucb1e3 anni fa

To be fair to OP, I would then go on to label these people as equally ignorant:

> A lot of people coming from the Unix-like world of macOS and Linux don't tend to know [PS]. Many people don't know it even exists at all. When I mention the Windows Terminal to people, they think I'm talking about the Windows Command Prompt, a crappy little program

I know that PS and the new terminal is not the same as cmd.exe, and that it has advantages like passing objects through pipes instead of stringly typing everything the way that sh-like shells work. But that's about the extent of it. (The powershell command names though, oh boy, even Java method names are better than that.)

> PowerShell also runs on Unix-like systems through PowerShell Core

I forgot about that. If anyone's interested in this, you may also enjoy learning that you can now run Windows Defender on Linux! And Internet Edgesplorer! The software we've all been waiting for, according to the Microsoft press release :D. These things amuse me to no end, but more seriously, getting to know PS better and trying out this object passing system does sound interesting.

Similar to how C# is secretly my favorite language, but it's just not well supported on Linux (mono and .netcore with monodevelop or the electron app called "VS Code" are just not the same as the Windows experience, e.g. Windows Forms and the real Visual Studio being huge omissions for me).

doorhammer3 anni fa

> Similar to how C# is secretly my favorite language, but it's just not well supported on Linux

C# is not-so-secretly my favorite language (though Clojure is a close second) and I use it pretty often on macos/linux.

IDE wise have you given Rider a try? Imo it's a totally viable Visual Studio replacement for most C# dev, though not as nice for all workflows or related tech.

Worth looking at if you haven't. It's not free, though, so that can blow depending on your tolerance for licensing. I've personally had an all-products pass with jetbrains for awhile now, so doesn't bug me, but ymmv

I also get a lot of mileage out of C# notebooks in VSCode. Honestly, I use C# for a ton of my daily scripting because I built up so many utility scripts over the years in LINQPad on windows, and they were pretty trivial to port

lucb1e3 anni fa

Dude, your comments are way too good to have an empty profile. No, I did not know of Rider, but next time that I get the C# itch again, I'll definitely be looking at what I've been missing out on!

Checking it out quickly, it's from JetBrains (a good sign for software quality) and has a 30-day trial so I'd know what I'm paying for. On the downside, ~175€ is quite steep given that it's not for a commercial purpose and I am currently fine getting my programming done in pluginless Vim. And that's not a one-time payment: that's for the first year. I can't just move on for a while and come back to expect to open up a project file and it to just work :/. I think this is not going to be for me at this price point, though the 30 days trial might be a challenge mode to start and finish a project that I might otherwise never finish at all!

Edit: And I wasn't even yet talking about your comment history. Spotted two insightful comments while skimming the top level of the first page of comments (I stopped there), and that already takes me all the way back to 2015. Not saying you must post more if you don't want to but e.g. the timer tip seems to have helped a lot of people :)

tomjen33 anni fa

Just to clarify: when you buy you get a license for the current version that is yours to keep and then you get updates through the year, so you can drop back and use an older version if you don't want to keep paying.

Mind you I had the all products pack for a while now, so YMMV.

logbiscuitswave3 anni fa

JetBrains makes damn good stuff. I do C# professionally and even though I use Visual Studio for the bulk of my work, it’s built in refactoring pales in comparison to what JB’s ReSharper provides. (Yes, VS has been catching up but it still has a long way to go.)

Anyway, yeah, Rider by itself isn’t cheap but for not a lot more you can just get the entire JB suite. It includes a whole ton of useful stuff that’s multi-platform and multi-language. When I’m doing Mac dev work, I find Rider to be much better for a lot of things than VS Mac is. (As long as I don’t need Azure integration.)

I could get my employer to reimburse it, but I find it all so useful both for work and for personal projects that I decided it was worth just paying out of pocket and not having to worry about it.

doorhammer3 anni fa

> Dude, your comments are way too good to have an empty profile

Thanks! I really appreciate that. Been kind of a bummer year so it's nice to hear (#layoff problems, so I'm definitely not the only one, and I think that's looking up recently)

I don't think I'd get Rider by itself, either. I was doing consulting for awhile and ended up getting the jetbrains all product thing personally because was jumping between Goland, Rider, Webstorm, and Rubymine, and Datagrip a lot (I honestly don't remember which are paid now). I got it personally because I ended up using it so much. I ended up using CLion (which is paid) for learning Rust, too, which was nice.

definitely check out the 30 day trial. And 100% JetBrains knows what they're doing

Have to dip, but feel free to ask whatever questions and I'll check it out when I get back. No pressure either way.

lostmsu3 anni fa

FYI I tried CLion for Rust, but did not feel any improvement of experience in comparison to VS Code + Rust analyzer plugin, so I cancelled CLion. In fact, VS Code somehow felt better.

I do use Rider 50/50 with big Visual Studio though. Mostly because I feel that the need to eventually switch to Linux is creeping as Windows adds more junk.

doorhammer3 anni fa

I've heard the VSCode + Rust analyzer situation has gotten really good. I think this might have been when it wasn't as solid? I'll have to check out the VSCode situation again sometime.

The one thing I don't like about Rider vs Visual Studio + ReSharper is that ReSharper has some really advanced structural/semantic searches that haven't made their way into Rider. I don't use it a ton, but being able to do queries across the AST annotated with semantic/type info is really useful if you're working on a legacy C# project that's been copy pasted fifty times--once per state (actual thing that I ended up working on)

otherwise, Rider is rad, and I have way more intellij platform bindings and such setup for them all

doorhammer3 anni fa

> The powershell command names though

Just wondering if you're talking about command name length or something else?

Asking because it comes up a lot and almost all the common commands have idiomatic short/terse versions (gci for Get-ChildItem, etc).

No shade, though. No reason you'd know if you don't have a reason to know it.

Would love to hear if I'm making the wrong assumption and it's something else you're talking about. I personally really love powershell, but also get why people love bash. I'm still pretty comfortable with bash because I work in *nix systems mostly, so it makes sense for me to know it, whereas the reverse (with ps) isn't really true for most devs

lucb1e3 anni fa

Yeah that's basically it, so thanks for mentioning abbreviations! I knew they had some aliases (e.g. ls, curl) but not that it was commonplace because any powershell tutorial uses the long form and capitalizes everything (indeed I don't interact with PS a lot). It all feels very design-by-committee. Not sure whether it's a good thing that guides never use the short form: long more readable, but the specific choices of words give me weird vibes and run off blog-width line lengths. OP shows that nicely with the bash version fitting on ~60% of the line (on my screen) but the PS version running out of the line.

A lot has been written about naming things and brevity versus clarity, and while I sit very firmly on the programmer's side as opposed to the math people side (single letter variable names, in weird fonts or languages if they (surprise!) run out of available letters), I think I am more of a bash person than a java person in terms of naming things. Word-ish commands like pushd, kill, read, etc. (taking some bash built-ins here as examples, rather than external programs which may be named arbitrarily) seem a lot nicer to me than either very long commands or acronyms where you basically still have to know the long form to remember it. I'd never have guessed that spps stands for stop-process yet that's the portable powershell form of 'kill' (just looked that one up).

Eji17003 anni fa

I think this kinda shows the issue, and why I personally prefer ps (as someone who's bounced off bash and NEVER gotten the time to get decent at it, and who rarely needs to use any of these and never at any serious level, so massive grain of salt).

Kill is intuitive to you because you've probably been around tech your whole life, and tech has just used "kill" ever since. It's essentially as ubiquitous as "bug".

That said, if I had to teach someone brand new with next to no skills (the endless goal of making coding easier for the average person and so on), Stop-Process is a hell of a lot easier to teach, or rather, it's much easier to teach them to help themselves.

Since it follows the same naming template as every other powershell command, if you teach them how to use the basic commands like Get-Help/Get-Command, they're a hell of a lot more likely to figure it out themselves without needing assistance. You know that every cmdlet is verb-noun, and you know you're trying to stop a process, so something like

> Get-Command "*process*"

Gives you a short list that is extremely intuitive to figure out.

Now...for something as simple as "kill" you're not expecting a beginner to run a command with a wildcard search. You'll just tell them. But that entire philosophy is extremely helpful when you're in a situation where you do need to figure out the command and don't have the ability to just spend however many minutes on google, and if you teach PS right you get to a point where it's very easy to teach yourself.

Obviously how much this matters in a world of IDE's and search engines and now AI is questionable, but I think that if you redid bash today, it'd follow similar philosophies. Things like touch, grep, and arguably even echo really strike me as "favorites" just because of the inertia/ubiquity.

kaba03 anni fa

The convention is to use the short form whenever you are in a terminal for one-off commands, but go for the full name for script files that has to be maintained/read later — which is an absolutely sane policy in my opinion.

Bash is a write-only-full-of-bugs language, comparatively.

doorhammer3 anni fa

100% and I never thought of that before but I can see how you'd get that impression from tutorials.

The VSCode powershell extensions will also give you suggestion squigglies under all of your aliases in a saved script if they're not long-form, but I usually mix and match based on pragmatism.

My use of alias vs long-form usually comes down to two sort of situations:

* Ad-hoc at the shell: all aliases all the time (and make my own if I need to. welcome to my godless wasteland, population: me) * Shared scripts: Just like any code, do what's idiomatic for the team. Usually it's largely aliases with some long-form

In practice I'd say the formatting consistency situation on teams isn't nearly as bad as SQL but obviously not as good as Go.

For reference, I'm also a huge APL fan, so hit me with arcane symbols in my free-time all day long, but definitely pragmatic balance at work.

I also don't even think of them as acronyms personally. The acronym just sort of means the semantic action in my brain at this point, but I think that's mostly a fluency thing, and can't really speak to it being hurtful/helpful since I'm so removed from when I first started learning it

lucb1e3 anni fa

Regarding not thinking of them as acronyms: yeah I get that. I was wondering how to best phrase that sentence because, indeed, curl also does not stand for C Uniform Resource Locator in my head, or grep for global regular expression perl-style (if I'm remembering that one correctly). It's just curl and grep. However, whereas curl and grep are really treated as names, spps I can currently regurgitate only by thinking of stop-process, and I imagine most such abbreviations will be like that for a while.

doorhammer3 anni fa

totally agree, and yeah, "you eventually memorize all the arcane bits" definitely isn't a point in favor of powershell

there are also some commands I use all the time that don't have built in aliases like the json converters, so that makes cross-machine alias consistency for some important things not great