Questions about windows support

[Adam D. Ruppe]

On Tuesday, 21 February 2012 at 00:37:33 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> Weird. I guess I must be a very strange person, because I find 
> that my productivity soars at the command-line

Me too. Command line rocks, and bash is a fine shell.
(csh sucks though, why its the default on so many bsds
is beyond me.)

What I'm talking about here is the underlying technology
and ease of programming.

It isn't difficult to get a compiler on Windows and
write code. You can use Visual Studio, or notepad, or
anything in between.

You can write a lot of code easily, from 16 bit DOS
programs (well, not anymore on 64 bit, but you could for
a long, long time) up to gui apps, including doing
console apps that have an api similar to vga text hardware.


On Linux, you have to worry about terminal escape
sequences, libc incompatibilities, and all kinds of other
stuff to write similar programs.



Remember though, that this isn't about the shell or
userland. I really like the Linux command line (though
it isn't perfect... ever gotten "command line too long"
due to how * is expanded by the shell? Ugh.).


But anyway I really like it, but the operating system
isn't any easier to program for. Indeed, if you want to
distribute your app, it is a lot harder due to compatibility.

Windows apps tend to just work.