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by marcosdumay 3508 days ago
It's probably not true.

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.
1 comments
emodendroket 3508 days ago
> 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.

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marcosdumay 3508 days ago
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.

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WayneBro 3508 days ago
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.

The people here on HN live in a bubble.

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pmontra 3508 days ago
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.

So, it could be a bubble but it's a large one.

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