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by gonepostal 4832 days ago
I used to work at Microsoft so i can alpreciate how that shapes the lense of how you view the world.

I think the statement that Rails might of gotten further on the windows platform is a ridiculous statement. Ruby as far back as remember is a language that prefered environment was Linux. There was a point where there was no windows version. I remember when even on OSX the installation of ruby was an endevour. OpenSsl incompatabilities, gems with c extensions that never worked right (rMagick which is a Linux first lib). So the underlying language that backs Rails is not windows friendly. There is no doubt in my mind that Windows would have been a hindrance not a positive.

Macs are only popular because for the most part they are similar enough to Linux that you can develop on a Mac and deploy to Linux. I don't know of one Rails shop that chooses to deploy on Windows.

1 comments

That's not what I meant, although I see that the "it's Mac first development" thing didn't help. I agree with your point that the BSD heritage of OSX really positioned it well as a *nix dev platform.

I didn't say that Rails would have gotten farther on the Windows platform. That would be silly; you're assuming that because you're assuming I have misshapen lenses and / or am an idiot. I get that some mostly Microsoft devs are sheltered, but some aren't. I've worked with Mac and Unix going back a few decades.

What I said was that the native Windows / Node experience is probably better than the native Windows / Rails experience because the Rails community by and large really isn't all that interested in how it works on Windows (see link).