Robby on Rails

Curt Hibbs announced his blog this morning and it was due to a post on Loud Thinking, where he mentioned a Paul Graham post about the Mac adoption amongst hackers. In David’s post he made the following comment, While I can certainly understand the reasons why some people go with Linux, I have run all but dry of understanding for programmers that willfully pick Windows as their platform of choice. I know a few that are still stuck in the rut for various reasons — none of them desire.

Curt responded in his personal blog on this as David had shut off comments on the entry after getting a bunch of harsh responses. Curt made a few good points on how David’s comments were not very fair to people as he made a lot assumptions that yes people do get stuck working in a Windows environment, but to proclaim that none of it is from desire is kind of missing the bigger picture. If people are using Ruby/Rails on any system is better than not at all. I would assume that the majority of people using Rails are probably Windows users and it’s another good way to lure people off of the Microsoft boat.

Reasons why I do not own a Mac as an operating system:
• Too expensive to get started. I have spent my whole life (since age 5) building my own machines and have only ever personally purschased one commercial computer, which was a Dell Laptop about 5 years ago when I was in college.
• I don’t want to be part of the iScene
• Apple is a pushy corporation and will continue to use their lawyer power on people
• Apple is a patent whore like Microsoft, IBM, etc

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s pretty and all, but if you have ever seen my desktop, you’d know that I never see my desktop unless you see the background coming through my transparent terminal screens. So, what does OSX offer me as a Linux user that I don’t already got? The only thing that I was able to think of was, Safari for testing and Photoshop? I’m not a designer, so thats a non-issue for me.

I have a good friend who is working in a .NET world and is learning Ruby/Rails. He is able to migrate to Linux for the cost of a few CDRs and he’s already playing around with Linux for the first time. He cannot abandon his x86 hardware for Apple hardware overnight and I think this holds true for most people.

However, I would never tell him that he is a bad programmer for choosing to work in the Windows world, it’s not something that I wanted to do anymore, but I made the change on my own. I hope that David is better able to explain why he felt it necessary to condem a huge portion of the work force, who are taking interest in his work. Don’t piss them off, they might take that into consideration when choosing to use your business or not.

Having said that, if you use any computer, you suck. :-p

Besides, when I think of a typical Mac user, I think of Best of Show.

Disclaimer: As always, I forgot to hit the sarcasm button