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Comment by tdavis | Hacker News Reader

"I finally gave up trying to get ruby talking to MySQL on my home windows box and just moved everything over to linux"

I'm not a Windows fan by any stretch, but it seems like people put up with a lot of shit to use Rails; why would you choose a web framework which requires you to change your operating system? That's asinine. It seems these days when people say bugs and shortcomings "don't matter" they really mean "I haven't run into a situation where they've screwed me over yet or if I have I just let the framework win". It's a web framework, people; it should make easy/moderate things easier, not make hard things any harder, and get the hell out of your way. It should not make you change your life to use it.

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why would you choose a web framework which requires you to change your operating system? That's asinine.

Your desktop operating system != your server operating system.

There are no "windows web frameworks" and that's not a coincidence. If you're serious about bringing something online then your first step should be to learn the proper tools anyways.

Insisting on a windows-platform only because that happens to be your preferred desktop OS, now that would be asinine.

What is asp.NET then?

I'm tempted to just say "A failed attempt at humor" but I'll rather say, okay: There are no web frameworks other than asp.net.

There are no "linux web frameworks" either, aside from Rails I guess, because I don't know of any currently popular language other than Ruby that doesn't really work on Windows.

cython, and its modules.

Most frameworks are obviously not bound to a particular OS but almost all of them are developed on a Unix and more or less assume a POSIX platform.

Yes, many do have a section in the docs for "Installation under windows" but that's normally intended for a development environment, at most and comes with many little strings attached such as "not tested on windows"-markers in the docs and raised eyebrows on the mailing list.

It's almost certainly not the only factor. I mean, yeah, it's stupid to switch OSes just for a web framework, but it's not stupid to switch to Linux.

If you want to work on Windows support, well-tested patches are usually accepted.

Why use a non-POSIX os?

He may be targeting Windows users (since there are an awful lot of them), or want to tie in to some Windows-specific functionality, or a host of other reasons.

Of course, JRuby on Rails (Rails on the JVM) is also a very viable option, and comes with a few nice features you don't get in Rails (Job scheduling with Quartz being my favorite), at the cost of having to deal with the complexity of the JVM (GC tuning is a pain in the ass).

The framework and language you chose are only a part of your company strategy.

This is what people mean by "it just works", because if it doesn't you give up immediately.

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