[realusername]

I sadly had the same experience as this guy. I guess when you are a standard user browsing the web, everything works fine on windows, but if you are a web developer it's just a nightmare.

There is always something to install which is not there, I have to install tons of drivers, Putty, WinCSP, a decent terminal (cmd.exe is just unusable), WAMP, python, various python libraries, perl, node.js (lots of front-end tools needs it now), Cygwin (otherwise it's impossible to do anything with the base programs), wget.exe, 7zip, notepad++ (the built-in notepad does not handle newlines properly), git, setup bash aliases, emacs, Firefox ... (the list can be expanded).

So yeah, you can code on Windows, but you are basically fighting with the system all the time to install everything you need.

[sudioStudio64]

The thing is...you're trying to make it act like linux. That will be a fight. If you take the time to learn how things are done on windows...or any platform for that matter...it wouldn't be that hard.

[jevgeni]

This is exactly the thing.

I have been using xBSD and OS X for the last 10 years, but have been confronted with the need to do some financial modelling on Windows (as a side note, I guess this is not "serious" computing, according to some comments here).

Attempt #1: Try the SciPy/Anaconda stack. Mostly OK, but Python's Windows support is an afterthought. Anaconda is especially sweet, but getting any kind of serious Python distribution running in a corporate environment is a pain. Integration being the main source of misery.

Attempt #2: Try F#. Sweet mother of god, everything runs, compiles, does what I expect it to do and efficiency is awesome. Visual Studio 2013 is although an IDE, but nowhere near a bloated, monstrous carcass like Eclipse; or in fact not as bloated as some Emacs setups I've seen. Only "downside": the need to buy a couple of books on .Net and F#.

The moral of the story: Microsoft has an enormous capacity to create some ground breaking stuff and then f- it up completely by bad commercial decisions. Thankfully it seems, they've started to fix that.

[sudioStudio64]

Whether anyone here thinks that is serious enough or not...that's pretty freaking cool. Right on.

[prawn]

Makes me wonder. Microsoft are open-sourcing things in an obvious attempt to win back the developer crowd. Is there more they can do in enabling default (where appropriate) or quick installs of typical developer tools?

[malka]

An usable package manager. And en equivalent to /usr/local/(lib|include) as well. Installing libraries is a nightmare on windows.

[wolfgke]

Installing multiple versions of a shared library (Debug, Release etc.) is a nightmare on Linux.