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Why Mac OS X Is Unsuitable For Web Development
Hugh Pickens writes "Ted Dziuba has an interesting and amusing post on how he made a big mistake when he was offered a choice for his company laptop. His options were a Lenovo Thinkpad or a MacBook Pro, and he picked the Mac, thinking it would be closer to what he was used to. So what's wrong with using the Mac as a development machine for Milo, a Python application backed by PostgreSQL and Redis? 'I've only poked around a little, but so far I've found three separate package managers for OS X: Fink, MacPorts & Homebrew,' writes Dziuba, adding that when you are older, you will understand the value of automated version dependency satisfaction. Next is that your development platform should be as close as possible to your production platform, but 'OS X and Linux have different kernels, which means different I/O & process schedulers, different file systems, and a whole host of other implementation details that you'll write off as having been abstracted away until you have your first serious encounter with "It Works On My Machine.'" Finally, he says, Textmate sucks. 'Sooner or later, you have to face facts. Man up and learn Emacs.'"
doesnt matter.
'xammp in some flavor' running in your desktop os, still means 'different from the production environment' you are going to run the thing on. xammp on mac will need to behave as xammp on a mac.
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That is exactly his problem. He has a deployment environment that's different from this development environment, and he expects them to be the same when they're clearly not. This is quite possibly the stupidest drivel I have ever read, and obviously he's an amateur programmer. If your deployment environment is Linux, then get a Linux box to develop your code. His argument is just as stupid as saying "Windows is unsuitable for developing Linux software". This clown should be catapulted into the sun.
Furthermore, if this guy is a Web developer, then why is he concerned about underlying architectures? Stick with HTML and CSS and leave the heavy coding for the adults.
Written an article explaining that you shouldn't choose OSX when you need to develop for Linux, apparently...
I have no idea why this troll of an article ever hit /.
With compelling arguments like "textmate sucks, man up and use emacs" (yes that really is the whole argument for what's wrong with text editing on OS X) I'd expect better from an IRC troll, let alone a slashdot troll. And hell, that's completely ignoring the fact that if you really want to, emacs runs just fine on OS X.
Personally, I consider a Mac to be pretty much the ultimate web dev platform, because it gives you easy access to all browsers on all major platforms, and gives you some of the best tools (yes, better than emacs, and even better than vi) to develop with. There are many imperfections, but it's better than all the other options.
Nobody said anything about anyone gay. Wait, you don't think a man acting effeminately and a man being homosexual are the same thing, do you? Talk about stereotypes...
Gender is a powerful cult in almost every culture. Yes it's lame and probably counter-productive in many ways, but that probably suits most people fine, when you get right down to it. Or as a very wise man once said:
"People -- what a bunch of bastards!"
Caveat Utilitor
Okay, if you want counter arguments to the "points" in the troll, here you go:
So you totally ignore the pathetic developer package management in OS X
The article complains that there are 3 different package managers for OS X and that choosing between 3 tools confuses him... Well here's news for him, there's *way* more than 3 package managers for linux. He then goes on to explain that he uses dpkg on linux and is very happy with it. If this is the case, I suggest he uses fink on OS X, as it's a direct port of debian's package manager. He also complains that he ends up compiling things all the time. Clearly, he fails at reading the manual pages, because fink is entirely capable of installing binary packages.
the fact no one uses OS X for serious web hosting
Entirely correct – this is why you use things like (insert favourite scm tool here) to deploy to a test environment and check that your code works in something extremely similar to your deployment environment. This is basic computing 101 – test your binaries where they'll be running. Sorry, but "I'm going to deploy to linux, therefore OS X sucks" is not a good argument.
then blather on about a cruddy text editor?
no, actually, I "blathered on about" a cruddy argument. If he had valid complaints about TextMate I wouldn't call him a troll, but instead he simply states "man up and use emacs" – this isn't an argument, it's just plain bare faced trolling.
You obviously don't develop.
Wrong, but this is only an appeal to ridicule, a well documented logical fallacy, so I'll chose to ignore it.
Guess you're another overzealous Apple fanboy.
Another appeal to ridicule, so I won't grace it by saying "Guess you're another overzealous anti-apple fanboy." Damn, I just did, guess I couldn't help myself.
Personally, I consider a Mac to be pretty much the ultimate web dev platform, because it gives you easy access to all browsers on all major platforms, and gives you some of the best tools (yes, better than emacs, and even better than vi) to develop with. There are many imperfections, but it's better than all the other options.
Author is bitching because he thinks the Mac is not an ideal platform to run the application.
With that I agree. Don't run the server-side of the web application on your development workstation.
Instead: save the files directly to a remote folder on an actual webserver running the target OS, by remote mounting the filesystem (or automatic synchronization), and run the application on the remote server, for testing during development.
Well, it has certainly finally taken the crown from emacs in the crucial "loading time" and "memory consumption" stakes! Congratulations, Eclipse team, on finally making all those pro-vi arguments about emacs being inefficient look silly.
No, see Beelsebob's post above.
"Deploy"
It's a key step in your engineering process. It should be a repeatable testable process. It should take microseconds through automation. It should be configurable to permit deployment to dev, systest, SIT, UAT, stress, OAT, Prod, DR* environments without needing to change the packaged deployable.
You're entirely correct with "Don't run the server-side of the web application on your development workstation." but mounting production server storage from your dev machine is frankly almost as bad.
*adjust to fit your SDLC
So you suggest that people buy Apple computers even when they fail, because you can run a better operating system in a VM? Let me quote:
What a total retard.
c++;
...sure. Pick an OS because it is the one that is the most hostile to being virtualized and has the most expensive hardware so when you do decide to run something in a VM you will pay dearly for the priveledge or simply be out of luck.
The real question is why bother with MacOS in the first place?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Particularly when it's written in Python. I mean... jesus. If you've managed to have a problem with your *web application* written in Python, because the scheduler is different? Get out of coding.
I was writing a C/curses application with pthreads on OSX that compiled with no modifications on Linux. Ran fine, too, after I changed a stupid assumption about select() that worked on *BSD but not Linux. And that was my fault for not following POSIX.
This guy is an idiot with a rage-on. How did this make Slashdot? Oh right...
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.