[coldtea]

>Selection bias. People who go to tech conferences make up a tiny share of all the people working in the industry.

Yes, but they're also more influential in the respective communities, and more probable as presenters to be writing stuff others use (e.g. this Firefox dev tool).

So they'll use what they personally use to develop.

>Also FWIW as a long time JS dev, it seemed to me like Rails actually was one of the major contributors to the macbook monoculture because Rails (in the early days) was popular with startups who also often focused on iOS apps first, which means they had no other choice than to use macOS for development.

I don't think that's the case - Rails confs/devs was mostly Macs before iOS apps where a thing (which happened 4-5 years after RoR was released).

[pluma]

Interesting. It definitely didn't seem the case for web dev outside of Rails though. In the mid-2000s it felt to me like the default was Linux (because servers were running Linux) and beginners started on Windows (because that's what they already had at home). But then again web dev mostly meant LAMP (or WAMP for development, via XAMPP).

But this may be a regional thing (so selection bias again). When I was freelancing as a Python web dev, the few places that used Python usually used Plone/Zope (barely anyone used Django or Flask) and there were even fewer places using Ruby except startups. The popularity of Plone/Zope seems to be very much a German thing, just like SuSE Linux and Typo3/Drupal (instead of Wordpress). We've even had a very large Firefox marketshare until fairly recently (because of privacy concerns over Google Chrome).

That said, in European JS conferences over the past five years I'm definitely seeing more and more non-macbooks each year.