Richard Wong, head of engineers at Coursera, in an interview at the site lifehacker.com has declared:
I used to be a PC-only person, back during my days at Microsoft, but now I’m pretty much Apple only. It has some of the best development tools for engineers.
It beats me, though. I knew that PCs are good for gaming and developing, but which are the conclusively superior development tools for engineer? I’m confused.
which are the conclusively superior development tools for engineer?
Most of the cutting-edge projects that I know have simple installation instructions in Linux/Mac, along the lines of “oh, you sudo apt-get project and then it manages all the dependencies for you and just works,” whereas getting them to work in Windows is something of a “alright, you need to get X, Y, and Z, and also want W but it doesn’t really work in Windows so here’s a hack to work around that kind of, which might stop working whenever they upgrade.”
I suspect this is the impression he’s pointing at.
Writing code on Windows works reasonably well if you stay within a pre-built environment (e.g. Visual Studio, Eclipse, R Studio, etc.) Stray out of it and you’ll be forced to painfully kludge together some bastardised version of Unix inside Windows.
Macs are Unix machines at their core (with a pretty GUI on top) so from the writing code point of view there isn’t a great difference between a Mac and, say, an Ubuntu machine.
By the way, Richard Wong’s favourite text editor—Sublime Text—is available on all three platforms.
I’m not sure what are you asking. IMHO for development Linux/Unix environment is superior, but in specific cases it all depends on what kind of application software is available.
You mentioned engineering which could imply, say, CAD/CAE software, and at this level you’re basically comparing applications and OSes (Win/Mac/*nix) matter only to the extent that the program you need will run on them.
Richard Wong, head of engineers at Coursera, in an interview at the site lifehacker.com has declared:
It beats me, though. I knew that PCs are good for gaming and developing, but which are the conclusively superior development tools for engineer? I’m confused.
Most of the cutting-edge projects that I know have simple installation instructions in Linux/Mac, along the lines of “oh, you sudo apt-get project and then it manages all the dependencies for you and just works,” whereas getting them to work in Windows is something of a “alright, you need to get X, Y, and Z, and also want W but it doesn’t really work in Windows so here’s a hack to work around that kind of, which might stop working whenever they upgrade.”
I suspect this is the impression he’s pointing at.
Yep.
Writing code on Windows works reasonably well if you stay within a pre-built environment (e.g. Visual Studio, Eclipse, R Studio, etc.) Stray out of it and you’ll be forced to painfully kludge together some bastardised version of Unix inside Windows.
Macs are Unix machines at their core (with a pretty GUI on top) so from the writing code point of view there isn’t a great difference between a Mac and, say, an Ubuntu machine.
By the way, Richard Wong’s favourite text editor—Sublime Text—is available on all three platforms.
I’m not sure what are you asking. IMHO for development Linux/Unix environment is superior, but in specific cases it all depends on what kind of application software is available.
Yeah I wasn’t very clear. Can you think of any developement tools that is definitely superior / works only on Apple?
By “development” do you mean “writing code”?
You mentioned engineering which could imply, say, CAD/CAE software, and at this level you’re basically comparing applications and OSes (Win/Mac/*nix) matter only to the extent that the program you need will run on them.
Head of engineering at Coursera means software engineering.