Hi tyler,

I don't even think my opinions are remotely controversial in the broader community. Remember, I'm not even saying that Windows > Linux on an absolute scale. I'm mostly saying that the same scale that has PHP < other, well-designed languages, should have Windows > Linux. Linux is extremely popular in the web development community, but it overlaps heavily with use of PHP. Cultures also overlap.

I do almost all my hobbyist programming in Linux and split my career so far between a Windows shop and a Unix shop.

Yes I guess if I'd have said "for web based stuff" we could have avoided the entire debate

"Web based programming" is kind of the default association for programming for me. The ERP software I worked on was web based and most random stuff I do is.

Yeah, this is not the consensus opinion at all. If I ask random developers is php worse than "other, well-designed languages" and is Windows is better than Linux for development - I'm pretty sure the biggest grouping of answers will have "PHP < other, well-designed languages" and "Windows < Linux".

I'm not sure why, then, you feel comfortable judging Windows for web development. And you did not qualify your original statement for web development.


This is a strange claim because you're so against PHP. PowerShell is a very well designed language compared to most Unix shells. It's comparable to Python or Ruby, whereas most Unix shells are comparable to PHP.


Almost the entire unixoid userland is available on Windows. If you're relying heavily on random shell scripts (otherwise VS is highly scriptable/automatable at a much higher level and in a much more structured manner than the unix userland), I'm not sure what your problem with PHP is. PHP is an overgrown scripting language that brings that culture into the language.


Reified generics, better metadata support, better versioning support, better support for tail calls, better support for dynamic languages, etc. These features matter if you care about using well-designed languages, as opposed to Blubs like Java and PHP. Also, looking at the support, support for F# is native in VS, whereas you have to go through a lot of hoops to use better JVM languages like Clojure and Scala.


I do all my hobbyist programming in Linux. Also, nearly all such open-source tools are available on Windows.


Didn't we go over this for PHP? Most linux web servers run PHP. It's odd to talk about how much better Linux people are at this or that, and how much worse PHP people are at this or that, when most Linux people are PHP people and vice versa.


I've probably used Linux longer than you have and I do too. But what I believe or prefer has nothing to do with what offers a superior development environment. My preferred set of tools for web development looks like this: Emacs/git/JVM/Scala/sbt/Lift. But this doesn't mean the guys over at stackoverflow/stackexchange are worse programmers than I am.

exactly

too easy for anyone to just claim "troll" whenever their opinion is challenged

whether the person is a troll or not is irrelevant, only the quality of the discussion is what matters.

I don't think anybody was disagreeing with this part.

I was just pointing out that his definition of troll isn't right. And as we all know, programmers love pointing out when they think other people aren't right.

Anyway, I'll let the troll conversation go. Although I'm still pretty amused by my bot joke.

The general context in here tends to be web based, startupy stuff. I'm aware i didn't qualify it that's why I added it now. I'm sure Windows is good for some kinds of development (I mentioned game development). In the context I work in...not so much.

Only hoop i had to go through to test Clojure was apt-get installing it (and maybe setting up Conque or whatever depending on your taste).

My claim is merely that the underlying security is better on Linux especially if the box is merely used for development.

Isn't most of security really about how the people who own the computer/server manage it?

thanks again for this.

the honest answer is i don't understand the framework in which he built the model, except in the most simple sense. i also don't know where to look for inefficiencies because i have never had to deal with a model this cumbersome. there's a ton of concatanates/indexes etc that i'm really not used to using, that aren't really rooted in financial logic, more in programming logic.

i'll be working with our current model for 1-2 months to get a handle on what he was doing and trying to understand and note on inefficiencies. the next 2 months i've been tasked with remaking it behind the scenes correcting those inefficiencies, working new version due by january 1st. all the while i'll be using the model to send updates until my new version is ready by then.

i'll take a look at your books, look like good ideas.

as for your questions:

1. Where does your input come from? Is it typed, clicked, pulled from files, pulled from web, pasted?

pulled from the web through a raw (pretty dirty) excel file. understanding is not totally complete, but i believe they have a page or two they use for these raw outputs which is then copy and pasted into some region on a sheet where required, then it's fed into a bunch of different worksheets (40-50+) which is serviced by arrays, indexes, vlookups, etc.

there's a bunch of linked sheets between different reports. and i think that's one of the biggest leaks in the reporting.

2. How many different questions are you trying to answer? Is there flexibility in the questions? The more general and unknown the questions, the better to stick to a tool that excel that already knows how to answer anything. You don't want to be writing your own query language.

sorry i dont follow this could you go more into what you mean by it? the outputs are just monthly or biweekly updates of specific property financials or metrics (vacancy rates, gross potential rent, NOI, etc.).

3. What format output is useful for your users? What do they expect?

hm unsure again what you mean here. basically the end user is one of three people:

a) CEO/c-level execs at our country who would just glance at the top/bottom line numbers
b) property managers who would look at very granular details, and in some cases be prompted to add forecasts to add to the projections of our models (they will input their new expected occupancy rates, expected utilities budget required, capex required, etc., very granular numbers but their actual work is very simple for our model)
c) asset managers like me and my team, who will update projections, evaluate our portfolio, think of new analytics, etc

There's only so much you can do if updates only come bundled on super Tuesdays and so forth. And obviously security also depends on the underlying OS and certain design decisions. Linux is certainly not a shining beacon of security (imo) but it's still a better default than Windows.

if you run as root in linux you would likely not consider it very secure

windows has certainly taken great steps with user account control to encourage people to run as a limited user instead of admin

Clowntable. Just use leinengen for Clojure install and setup. Saves a ton of headache, has a better repl, and its what everyone uses anyways.

For trivial standalone projects, this is easy. The problem is integration, support and documentation when you interoperate with the rest of the JVM ecosystem (say, with Eclipse, Maven, Java class library, Java web frameworks, etc).

dave,

thanks for posting that long version of the rich hickey talk.

i noticed he had that one line about driving by banging against guard rails as a dig against TDD.

is TDD something that's not done in the Clojure community, or was he bashing specifically the idea that tests can guide you 100% and you never have to actually understand your program?

i'm not willing to do the work required to establish what "the broader community is", but i don't agree with this.

i've been a build engineer for 10 years and: lol no. lolol.

I think he was just trying to drive home the point that tests don't gurantee code actually does what it's supposed to do and are oftentimes required exactly because a program is too complex. I don't think he's against tests but seems to not like the test first approach. He seems to prefer being able to reason about the program (obviously that's not mutually exclusive) and thinking of ways to break it and testing like that.

Also I'm not a Clojure programmer only meddled with it a bit but I have a feeling I won't be able to resist the call much longer so ...dave put your support hat on your desk just in case :P

I really like how the guy in the Google Python introduction videos talks about this. Cliffnotes: Google is pretty damn good for finding documentation. I tend to agree, assuming APIs etc are posted somewhere which is usually the case.

Support meh can't say much about that since I've never really needed support for a programming language or editor (outside of community support i.e. search engine stuff). Dunno what you mean regarding integration.

The issue is that you assume Microsoft stuff and thus conclude that Windows is really good. Yeah Windows is really good when you're working on C# stuff or F# stuff. I'd guess OSX is really good when you work on Objective-C stuff, too (I dunno guessing).

My claim is that if you work on OS agnostic stuff (i.e. web) Linux is the better platform. On a related note i don't think C# (given my limited knowledge) or JAVA are particularly excellent for web development but that is an entirely different discussion.

Also I'll say it again. I'm very aware that this is opinions and not facts. Basically cliffnotes...
1) PHP sucks, the language philosophy/mindset whatever you want to call it is just wrong
2) Windows sucks for non Windows specific development tasks...for lack of a better word because you're kind of working in what I'd describe as a "straightjacket" environment

And I guess the stuff that pisses people off...I think that people who don't agree with these two statements are less likely to be good programmers. For lack of a better description I think good programmers have a natural instinct for "elegance" and PHP and Windows are less elegant than other options.

This is a total non-argument. Clojure, for example, has leinengen, which serves as a thin wrapper between Clojure and maven, to generic. There's zero reason you'd ever have to see a POM file unless you are doing everything manually.

I don't buy the thought that the rest of the JVM languages don't have something similar. Complete non issue.

I'm still going to learn Clojure but I don't think I'm going to really get into it. The tooling on the jvm is really good but the web libs just don't seem to be there yet.

Nodejs has Express which is really awesome to use.
Ruby has Sinatra which is what Express is inspired from.

Clojure has Noir which is similar but seems like it's light years behind Express and way way more opinionated. Then it has Ring which isn't opinionated enough.

I wonder if there's something in between. To be fair I only looked for like an hour. I think I might just read more into functional programming and apply the philosophies to Javascript. JS has first class functions so a lot of the thought processes should be able to be ported over to JS.

yeah me too. i feel like i'm returning to my roots, as LISP was what we learned when i was getting my masters in stats like 12 years ago

Yeah Hickey himself said that he isn't really interested in web stuff and doesn't see Clojure as particularly awesome in that regard (from memory). My guess is that I'll wait untill LightTable is released and then I'll have a good reason to play with it

i'm now super annoyed that there is nothing like light table for ruby, and want to make some sort of ghetto version of it with vert split in vim, where the right pane executes the left pane file (or a test file associated with it) and insta-displays the results in the right pane every time you :w. or something like that....

TFS/WWF seems better designed than a random mix of build solutions ranging from make to ant to maven to roll-your-own in unix userland. In practice, things may be different - the difficulties with build systems often have to do with interoperating with ad hoc processes and tools that are already in place - but in practice PHP is quite useful and is the language behind the most successful startup of the last 10 years.


https://dl.dropbox.com/u/35498822/fr...-weakness.html

What keeps coming up is tooling, ide, documentation.



You also didn't address the documentation issue. Microsoft shows sample code for F# in its .NET API documentation. F# works out of the box in Visual Studio. Microsoft even added serious functional features inspired by F# to C# and .NET API, making interoperability substantially easier than say, between Java and Clojure.

Setting up Clojure is a major hassle involving a bunch of choices that the beginner is obviously not equipped to make.

Clojure works fine in Windows as well, btw.


Do you use Clojure in production?

I dunno Visual Studio is pretty hard to set up on Linux, too.

The programming language I work in requires me to install cygwin on Windows which isn't exactly beginner friendly, either.

And no credit to Windows development environment for making it easy to develop with a great, elegant language like F#, which no other platform vendor managed to do?

I don't understand what you mean. C# and F# work just fine for the web.


PHP, C# and Java rank 1st, 2nd and 3rd, at least according to this:

http://w3techs.com/technologies/hist...mming_language

At this point I have to think you're confusing what's hip in some circles with suitability.


Since tyler posted this, I'll use this analogy:

You hate PHP because it's a bazaar compared to those other cathedral languages. You hate Windows development environment because it's a cathedral, compared to the bazaar offered by Linux and a plethora of open-source tools. PHP doesn't have a philosophy or mindset - it's just a collection of things that work. The same can be said about development tools available in Linux. I don't see any consistency here.


Developing on Windows with Visual Studio is a heck of a lot more elegant than developing on Linux with a bunch of unrelated tools, jumping from one type of interface to another. Open-source is a great reason to use Linux and a collection of related open-source tools. Elegance is not. Visual Studio is more elegant than a collection of open source development tools much the same way that iOS is more elegant than Android. No, being able to run a different desktop environment or a custom UI skin is not elegance.

There are a lot of practical reasons to prefer using Linux over Visual Studio in Windows (or Android over iOS) but elegance of experience is not one of them.

It is for me. My experience with Visual Studio was far from elegant - especially when trying to do anything other than straight forward development. It's been a couple of years but I seem to remember frequently getting annoyed with the stupid right hand properties/configuration panes.

Edit: I also have a hard time finding a more elegant development environment than vim. And I've seen some amazingly elegant emacs set ups from co-workers too.