> Early windows development (for years after it became popular) was done at a DOS command line ...
I could just as easily flip this and claim that Linux development is all backwards because it's still done on the command line.
Given Microsoft's commitment to tooling, backwards compatibility and extensive documentation I think it's pretty lame to try and paint windows as not targeted towards developers. The difference is that windows has actual users, as opposed to the eternal horizon of "the year of linux on the desktop".
Effective early Windows development required a surprisingly thorough knowledge of DOS and x86 memory management/pointers that one had to get through books (unless one was poring through Intel chip specs). Even though Petzold's books were/are sold through Microsoft in my opinion is it's a stretch to call it documentation. For a long time, the best debugger was a third party tool - Soft-Ice. Their documentation/tools for XBox was pretty great, though, they had to do well there being new kid on the block. Microsoft had the benefit of 90% of PC market share at that time so we all had to learn it if we wanted a piece of that pie.
Those books where widely published from the start from Microsoft and Developers. There was aspects of the API were not released to the general public but it didn't stop a developer from knowing about them.
You also has the MSDN subscription that did cover a lot about the development.
Yes the MSDN subscription which seemed like kind of a racket at several hundred dollars ( it was up to $1000+ by 2001 depending upon support level/media ). Also they would frequently have documentation about something in one year, then drop it from the CD's/DVD's and if you got lucky you had those or someone was really nice and posted it on the internet. I remember having to figure out the IME's for Far East/etc input circa 2000 from a usenet post then handing that information down to a someone else on usenet so they could implement it as well.
The fact that you think a DOS command line c. 1993 and a Unix one (from, say, 1984 even!) are comparable basically ends this argument, you realize, right?
Yup you're right, the extensive argument you provided has completely convinced me of my errors. /s
The point I was making was that they're just different systems and approach things in different ways. Trying to say one is more "developer focused" than the other is a useless metric(which we'll take forever trying to define what "developer focused" even means).
One could make similar arguments about the Alto not having a command line, yet Smalltalk was incredibly powerful and focused at giving a top-tier development environment that still hasn't been match in some ways to this day.
UNIX and thus Linux are all about pure user power. The shell is great and there are lots of tools available by default like Awk, Perl, Python, TCL, Sed, GCC, Vim, Emacs...etc. The entire OS isn't perfect, but is designed for people who know what they're doing. Compare that with CMD & Batch and it is Linux is like an SUV that can also fly and shoot lasers while Windows is like a moped. Of course I'm exaggerating a good bit, but even Powershell has a lot of issues and doesn't allow you to easily do what you can in Linux. In Linux everything is text and it's easy to pipe things around. In Windows it's all objects and frustration. I agree that Smalltalk on the Alto is pretty cool, but Windows is nothing like that besides having some OO stuff. Something I do all the time on Linux is "locate filename" and pipe that to "grep" to be more specific. On Windows, open up the search Window and pray you can narrow it down or wait a very long time.
I use Windows and Linux at work. On Linux I feel like everything is designed to increase my productivity as are the tools at my disposal. On Windows, I'm always fighting the lack of good tools. Sure Visual Studio + .NET is pretty good if that is your thing, but I personally don't like having to open an IDE that uses that kind of resources if I essentially need to write a simple script. I've spent quite a bit of time with Powershell, but it simply isn't as productive as Linux due to the increased complexity. Sorry for the rant, but as i spend a lot of time with both OS, I have strong feelings on this.
I could just as easily flip this and claim that Linux development is all backwards because it's still done on the command line.
Given Microsoft's commitment to tooling, backwards compatibility and extensive documentation I think it's pretty lame to try and paint windows as not targeted towards developers. The difference is that windows has actual users, as opposed to the eternal horizon of "the year of linux on the desktop".