On 5/7/12 1:05 AM, Michael Hannon wrote:
Steve Lianoglou<[email protected]> wrote:
I spent 1997--2011 developing C and Java (not C++) on Unix/Windows/Linux and moved to Mac OS X and C++ a year and a half ago. > I *am* curious to know what is so nice about Mac OS X. 1. It's a form of Unix, making the shell more integrated than in Cygwin on Windows. 2. I really like their hardware (screens, weight, keyboards, trackpad gestures (partly software)). 3. There's currently less malware than on Windows. 4. It plays nicely with iPhone and iPad. I don't even have a cell phone, but I LOVE my iPad. (I don't know how well Windows or Linux run iTunes -- Apple's worse than Microsoft in trying to lock you in and control your content -- I don't buy content from iTunes, but you need it to sync and setup the iPad.) 5. All the cool kids have Macs :-) (They've taken over computer science departments and continue to get more popular in stats, and there's a definite network effect in OS use -- it helps to have users around to ask questions.) Every platform's easy to develop on if you only need to get things to the "works on my machine" stage. Every platform's a pain for developing cross-platform C++. Especially if you need multiple tool chains for different projects. Linux seems very crude as a desktop environment compared to either Windows or OS X. I especially hate its poor font support (yes, I've had experts sit next to me and fiddle all the controls, including installing my beloved Lucida console font). Historically, installing drivers was a major pain, especially a few years ago when 64-bit support was minimal for notebooks. I blame C++ for being a moving target, particularly the transition to C++11 features, its lack of regulation for basic data type sizes, and the uneven support of templates in the compilers. I went through several major revisions of Java (1.4 to 1.7) and they were all relatively seamless and backward compatible (only one problem ever in an obscure member declaration in an XML parsing API that was broken in 1.5). R's very strict in its compatibility requirements for CRAN. i386 and PowerPC? Really?
... I can see that Macs are useful if you have to deal with, say, Adobe products, etc. But I've never been able to fathom their appeal for work in math, statistics, science, etc. (My wife has multiple Macs, and she loves the things, even for her statistics research, but I don't seem to "get it".)
I didn't find Photoshop any easier to use on the Mac than on Windows, but I'm a fairly casual user. - Bob _______________________________________________ Rcpp-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.r-forge.r-project.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rcpp-devel
