> Some people on HN have accused me of working for MS just because I use their stuff.
I find it hard to believe it all happened in the couple minutes it took you to create the account and post this.
The main problem I see with developing for Windows is that the server side ecosystem outside Windows is much richer. Once you built your application on ASP.NET, you are pretty much limited to Windows servers or Mono on Linux and even that step may need some work because Mono is an incomplete subset of the Windows environment.
I would say the same for developing software that only runs on Solaris (and its descendants). Despite Solaris being an amazingly solid OS, if your app does not run neatly on other OSs, you are limiting yourself - you made many architectural decisions very early in the development process that will impact it for a very long time and, if you are not careful, limit your future decisions to whatever is available from a single vendor.
The last time I made a decision to move from Windows to Unix-likes it was a Java application running on the Orion server. It was a 15-minute job, even though we never gave much thought to porting it. I seriously doubt such thing is possible with ASP.NET and Mono.
Apart from .NET, there is little reason to go with Windows. Most of my development these days is with JavaScript, Python (with Flask or Django) and PHP. None of these would run any better on Windows.
Actually I've had to start over with this account. But...good catch. I'm trying to take some advice this time about the way that I respond to people.
I get your point about portability, its just not one that I agree with. I think that using the platform for what its good at is a totally viable thing to do.
I also take your point about the stack that you are using. Cheers.
I find it hard to believe it all happened in the couple minutes it took you to create the account and post this.
The main problem I see with developing for Windows is that the server side ecosystem outside Windows is much richer. Once you built your application on ASP.NET, you are pretty much limited to Windows servers or Mono on Linux and even that step may need some work because Mono is an incomplete subset of the Windows environment.
I would say the same for developing software that only runs on Solaris (and its descendants). Despite Solaris being an amazingly solid OS, if your app does not run neatly on other OSs, you are limiting yourself - you made many architectural decisions very early in the development process that will impact it for a very long time and, if you are not careful, limit your future decisions to whatever is available from a single vendor.
The last time I made a decision to move from Windows to Unix-likes it was a Java application running on the Orion server. It was a 15-minute job, even though we never gave much thought to porting it. I seriously doubt such thing is possible with ASP.NET and Mono.
Apart from .NET, there is little reason to go with Windows. Most of my development these days is with JavaScript, Python (with Flask or Django) and PHP. None of these would run any better on Windows.