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by MonkeyClub 123 days ago
> the purity of "working with what's installed".

Oh, a kindred spirit!

I too absolutely love the notion of the base install, and what can be done just by means of its already available toolset.

(Fun tidbit: Did you know Windows comes with a bare bones C# 5 toolchain, with csc.exe, and even vbc.exe and jsc.exe?)
4 comments
sneak 123 days ago
Not having one’s configuration present is kneecapping yourself needlessly.

If you’re going to have a custom config, you might as well have a custom executable.

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TZubiri 123 days ago
Oh but we have our configuration, it's all in the defaults baby. And what isn't like locking down /home/user permissions and increasing bash_history sizes, I keep it small and configurable in less than 2 minutes. (And server side only, which always requires more setup.

Not saying that spending the first days on a new project configuring your custom setup with the company's stack is bad, especially if you are categorizing as employee and are looking for a multi year long run. But I tend to do small contracts, 1 to 6 months, and starting right away is a nice boost.

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TZubiri 123 days ago
I played with the preinstalled languages in windows before, but the legacy stuff dizzied me before llms existed.

now that llms exist I am learning with dotnet, that now comes with windows, (or at least it comes with winget, and you can install a lot of kosher software, which is almost as good as having it preinstalled.)

If I ever hop onto an older machine I'll use the gpt to see what I get, i recall there's vbscript, apparently a .net compiler+runtime, and I saw a js interpreter in very old OS too.

A big inspiration in this realm is FogBugz historical "Wasabi". Their idea of compiling to PHP and c# i think it was, because it's what most OS come with, and their corpo clients can use it as it. It's in a joel spolsky blog post somewhere.

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ygra 123 days ago
> Did you know Windows comes with a bare bones C# 5 toolchain, with csc.exe, and even vbc.exe and jsc.exe?

Even with MSBuild 4. From the days when .NET Framework was an OS component and also the build tools (until Roslyn) were part of the Framework.

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chrisjj 123 days ago
> Did you know Windows comes with a bare bones C# 5 toolchain

Shh, please. If MS find out, they'll add a parrot to "improve" it.

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