[LUNI] What Operating Systems are Developers Using?

[David Rock]

* larry at garfieldtech.com <larry at garfieldtech.com> [2010-10-28 14:00]:
> On 10/28/10 1:52 PM, David Rock wrote:
> > * Jeff Yamada<slouchfuzz3 at gmail.com>  [2010-10-27 16:05]:
> >> http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2010/10/27/developer-os-preferences/
> >
> > What this fails to take into account is that the appropriate answer is
> > you develop on whatever platform your production environment will be.  I
> > have been burned by development on one platform for a system that will
> > ultimately be on a different one, and that ended up causing some real
> > headaches.
> >
> > Regardless of your preferences, _please_ develop in a like environment.
> 
> That's not always feasible.  Who in their right mind is going to develop 
> ON an Android or iOS phone?  I used to develop for Palm OS, and while we 
> had an emulator and sample devices the actual development happened on a 
> desktop.

But you ARE developing on the actual platform.  What do you think
"sample devices" are?  What I'm talking about is akin to developing in
an emulator and never trying it on a real device.  If you do that and
never have any issues, I want to live in YOUR idealistic world.

> Right now I'm a web developer.  There is no one platform.  There's 3 
> OSes and 5 browsers for about 13 target environments (IE not being 
> available on all OSes), then different versions...

Again, not talking about the same thing.  I've done web development,
too.  Are you telling me that you never test any of your code in ANY
other browser/OS combinations?  Web development is notoriously crappy
for compatibility issues, so you at least pick the subset target of
browser combinations and make sure your stuff works.  This is, again,
developing in a like environment.

> Even in the desktop world, WinXP, Vista, and Win7 are different 
> environments.  Or various different Linux distributions.

That is exactly my point.  You have to make a choice; either develop and
test in multiple environments, or pick the couple you expect it to run
in.  Either way, you have to be using the like environment in your
development, or you are going to run into production issues down the
road.

> I admire the simple development world in which you live, and wish I had 
> ever seen it myself. :-)

Development is not simple, it's a royal pain.  If you want your
application to work well, you MUST use the platform it will eventually
end up on, or it WILL fail.  I'm not saying that you _can't_ develop a
CakePHP app on a Mac, and put it on a linux system later, but if you
don't think about things like differences in OS while you are doing it,
or test heavily on the end system, you will get bit in the ass.

-- 
David Rock
david at graniteweb.com