The thing is I'm sure there's a very good reason his company mandates a Windows stack for all the development he's doing - the MS dev stack (for the most part) will not break when you update your system, install a new patch, upgrade your .NET framework, etc. etc.
Personally I can't stand Windows for web development (although Node looks awesome in VS), but there's advantages to both. The author seems to express regret and a feeling he missed out, but would he have become a better developer for embracing the alternatives he mentioned? Would he really have been able to get his work done better and more efficiently? He didn't provide any evidence of this.
What other stack would break when you update your .NET framework or update your system? I don't see that as very valid reason, most stacks have dependency management tools.
The one thing you save with the MS stack is time spent choosing and evaluating tools, you just pick whatever MS is offering.
What I meant was that, from my experience, updating/upgrading an open source tech stack usually causes the application it's running to break. I end up spending a day or two fixing things, where with a MS stack that rarely happens.
There are lots of bubbles or spheres of technology, some companies like Microsoft/Apple, others more open.
The particular thing about the Microsoft bubble/sphere is that it acts like a very overly attached parent that does everything for the kid (developer) and really can make them successful within their realm. But the nix/open other bubbles are where programmers have to know more, be more manual and be more independent. It is more of a street knowledge type game where the Microsoft bubble is the scheduled childhood. On the extreme, developers in Microsoft bubbles (or other bubbles for that matter Rails, Node.js) are like cults/religions.
There are good and bad sides to this type of approach to developers on a platform. They'll constantly look to Microsoft for solutions rather than independent open source ones (changing a bit but only recently). It is easy to see why companies like using this tech.
Now with overlay attached or strict parents, sometimes the kids when they see the real world, they run for the hills.
Hello, world!
There lots of great technologies to work with behind the MS:
NodeJS, PlayFramework, Django and Ruby on Rails - perfect tools for web development.
Javascript, Dart, Coffee script - web development languages/platforms.
Android, Objective C with/without the Apple's iOS - the best tools for mobile development and desktop.
Qt - best UI crossplatform framework for all OS like Linux, Windows.
Just choose the language/technology of your choice.
Or he could just install Linux and Grub and choose between OS's at boot. It's not like there's a law against having multiple operating systems on the same machine. That's how I do it- four OS's actually, a default FreeDos on a tiny partition, the original Windows XP Professionall x64, Windows 8.1, and CentOS 6.5. It's allowed me to transition to Linux without losing access to any critical functionality. Everything I might have been doing before via Windows is a 90 second reboot away in an emergency.
Realizing I could have as many OS's as I wanted was part of why Linux feels like the good parts of DOS - it reminded me that it's my computer to do whatever I want with. Don't get me wrong, nothing against Windows I'm just headed back to my roots and WIMP interfaces have outlived their attraction even if Metro is a great improvement.
Also, if he really wants to use a shell, he can easily install cygwin or just learn powershell.
I use both ms-tecnology than linux for work, and I like and hate some parts of both.
I think OP biggest problem is the fact that he used only the "main" (as "more common") tools of his os, ignoring that you can easily run almost any tecnology stack over it without the need of change the os itself
The shell is a second class citizen also in OsX for what I know (sigh, I have really to find the money to buy and try a mac also out of the office)
The fact that is a "second class citizen" does not mean that it is less usable than in linux/unix, obviously if we exclude the first workarounds to make it works
ConEmu + Cygwin and you are mostly set. A few glitches here and there (unfortunately the latest tmux does not work on ConEmu). But don't expect the alternatives to be a walk in the park either.
I mainly hate that to install all the utilities I need, each time, I have to wait something between 30 and 50 minutes.
About how it works, since now, I had not any problem.
Nonsensical paths to all of my disks, the terrible emulator that is cmd.exe, the poor support for spaces, the ambiguity between forward-slash and back-slash, the fact that here and there, this or that random feature I take for granted on POSIX will not and cannot ever work...
That last one is especially frustrating because I'll spend three hours getting tool XYZ to compile on cygwin, and then just when the finish line is in sight I find "BTW /dev/null is unsupported in cygwin, and tool XYZ cannot run without it". I mean, /dev/null is supported, that's just an example- it's always something fundamental that you would never imagine doesn't work.
I think the point here is some people like to tinker with new things. There is a balance to strike here. Some do live in a bubble. On the other extreme are people who jump from one new thing to the next. Understanding the tools available is great but becoming an expert at something is import too. Most important thing is creating great products no matter what you use to build it. Your users don't care what it was developed in.
If you use only the tools your employer wants you to use at work in all likelihood within 2-5 years your skills will be obsolete to the point of you being nearly unemployable.
Of course, not always, depends on you, depends on your employer, depends on luck, but this is just my perception from working in software companies for most of the last 30 years.
The entire articles boils down to "I've been using MS tools, but now I use 'free' tools, and rediscovered command line". There isn't any plot, or a point, or a revelation, or a comparison between stacks in this missive. Nothing at all.
Wow, I didn't realize that It will be such a hype with this article :) What I was trying to say is, that in all those years that I worked in MS technologies, I completly overlooked other tehnologies. I just wanted to express, that a man has to have his eyes wide open. And I get a feeling, that open source guys has much more wide range of knowledge on all areas. Where did you first heard a news on HTML5? On HN or on some MSDN forum? This is what I was tryin to explain.
Personally I can't stand Windows for web development (although Node looks awesome in VS), but there's advantages to both. The author seems to express regret and a feeling he missed out, but would he have become a better developer for embracing the alternatives he mentioned? Would he really have been able to get his work done better and more efficiently? He didn't provide any evidence of this.