Linked from Chlorus’ find. These people are seriously getting desperate. Apparently an amorphous mass of Web Developers are about to rise up, Occupy-like, and storm Cupertino because Cupertino is just not good enough for Web Developers.
Don’t read it yet. Just scratch your head and try to figure out why not. Consider the needs of a Web Developer.
Zach Holman, “Mr Github,” has this pearl of wisdom (amongst others) to impart:
Attracted by the reasonable UNIX toolchain and the straightforward usability approach, more and more geeks adopted OS X as their primary machines.”
And Mr Klint Finley (fer him’s the guy) gibbers on:
But there’s always been a blight in developing on OSX under languages other than Cocoa, and that’s compiler support. In order to get gcc, developers have had to download Xcode. According to to Holman, this wasn’t a big deal back when X-Code was less than 500MB. But now Xcode costs $5 from the Apple App Store, and it’s a 4.5GB download that takes up 15GB once installed.
You know, life was so much simpler back in the days when a Web Developer didn’t have $5 to spare. Or a network connection capable of dealing with a 4.5GB download (coincidentally I believe that this is roughly the size of the latest Ubuntu). Or a whopping 15GB of disk space.
Yup, back in the days of Herbert Hoover, life sure was sweet for those Web Developer guys.
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And now you’ve read that, go back and read http://www.tmrepository.com/fudtracker/can-desktop-linux-stay-relevant-in-the-era-of-clou/ by Chlorus.
For Christ’s sake don’t just stare at the latest shiny thing in the window. That way lies freetardia.
Comments
Speaking of webdevs occupying things:
http://occupyflash.org/
http://occupyhtml.org/
Xcode reminded me one thing: before Apple revolutionary reinvented delta updates every tiny Xcode update took full 4.5Gb worth of downloads.
Ha, this revolutionary invention is apparently in its early days and doesn’t always work as intended: http://twitter.com/#!/decoding/status/137948154657124353
Or, ahem, there’s this: https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer.
From github, of all places.
Brain death forever!
Am I stupid… or don’t you also have to install XCode to get an Objective-C compiler on OS X?
And what does GCC have to do with web development, anyway? Who’s writing web apps in C and C++?
Come to think of it, is anybody writing web apps in Objective-C? I’ve never heard of that.
This whole article is more confusing than anything.
Getting web development tools for OS X is the exact same as Windows or Linux, you download your web language of choice (Ruby, PHP, Python, Go or whatever crap Google pushing right now), you download your framework of choice, and you configure the OS’ web browser to make use of them. Right? And it’s equally free.
I hate when people hijack words. The “Occupy“ movement is for serious things, not about whether a durdenstation will crash due to Flash or due to Firefox not supporting HTML5 as it should. Plus, you can‘t occupy something that doesn‘t have physical substance.
@Blakeyrat:
That was all left as An Exercise For The Reader, young feller.
I think it’s fair to say that Chlorus has dug up a Loon of the first water here. Even Pogson makes more sense.
On a good day.
Is “Occupy” serious in the same way that “Becoming a Senior Sysadmin at a Bank” is serious yet “Being a Pirate” is not?
We need to define our terms, here.
And… What does gcc has to do with Web Development…?
You forgot to add this in top of the second paragraph in bold
“If I want to release a great new Ruby gem that uses a C extension or library, I need to ask prospective users of that gem to:”
I bet you can turn most pieces of code in binaries and distribute them that way. Just stop using hipster toolkits.
Real programmers use C++! That’s why :P
fyi, kurkos, not everyone may consider the “occupy” movement serious…
Also, XCode doesn’t cost $5 anymore. It’s free again. Or course, this was written back in April when it did cost $5 — and I criticized Apple for that bit of nickel & diming. But the article makes more sense if it was titled “Is OS X Still Hobo Friendly”, where the answer will be — of course — no OS is as hobo-friendly as Linux.
And no matter how unserious Occupy Wall Street is, they still are more serious than web hipsters making pretentious websites to show how much better they are because they started hating Flash and loving HTML 5 because Steve Jobs posted a manifesto
Thanks for the shout out DrLoser!
I just realized, I use OS X for Java development, and even though Java is most certainly a second-class citizen on OS X I’ve never had issues.
“And… What does gcc has to do with Web Development…?”
That.
@ Kurkos
“The “Occupy“ movement is for serious things” – I thought the occupy movement was about setting trash cans on fire, behaving like a rabid monkey, acomplishing nothing in the process. I admit, I may be misinformed.
Anyway, as I said on OMGCC, I support the OccopyWC movement. Now that the lunch is over, I’m going to support it for another 1/2 hour.
“[A]complishing nothing in the process.”
Isn’t that supposed to be the usual outcome of such an exercise?
So, basically, OS X is “not a suitable platform for web development” because Zach Holman doesn’t want to compile C extensions for other people to use (and is unwilling or unable to use FFI). Awesome.
To answer Blakey’s question about why you might need C/C++ developmet tools, there are quite a few Ruby extensions that are useful to web developers, and several of them are only distributed as C sources.
I don’t know of any technical reason why binaries couldn’t be made available, so I imagine it’s either ignorance, laziness, or politics.
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