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Comment by venus | Hacker News Reader

I'd say Windows has been a second class citizen for a long time for any of the unix-centric open source languages. Ruby, Python, even node - you're fighting an uphill battle trying to do anything on Windows.

I'm sort of amazed they've made it run at all, the systems are so different. I'd advise anyone trying to run any of these systems on Windows to use a linux VM.

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>Ruby, Python, even node

Nope: Windows support in Python is good and well-maintained, afaik. It boils down to attention for neophytes, really, and applications in education... a field where Python has much more mindshare than Ruby or node (IMHO).

I concur. I've found Windows support in the Python community to be pretty good. The Ruby community seems to have more of a focus on posix platforms.

Point taken. However, like I said above, I know a few startups who use python, and the only Windows boxes there are for IE testing. Certainly no-one deploys on it. Academic computing seems to be a different world, though.

While I do lots of web work, the majority of my work with Python is as a scripting language embedded in a cross-platform app (Sublime Text). There are easily hundreds of thousands of developers who use that work on a daily basis.

The Windows support in Python is extensive enough I was able to write a web-client using ctypes and the native Windows network API to better support users with funky proxies and so forth.

Well, fair enough then, I take that back. Nonetheless, I know a few python web programmers, and zero of them use windows. I imagine that libraries would be a big issue too, not to mention the native lack of simple things like a proper command line, ssh, all the normal tools. Sure, you might be able to make it all kind-of work, but it's harder than it should be and decidedly outside of the mainstream.

Couldn't really comment on academic computing. I suppose, though, they are not really relying on the larger ecosystem as much as (say) web applications, so would not be affected so badly by the libraries issue.

Python is also used as a scripting and plugin language in several large commercial Windows applications.

While this is true, Microsoft is making a big push to get Ruby working more equitably on its platform (for example, they had a heavy presence at Chef Conf), so I wouldn't expect this to continue indefinitely.

Yeah, they say that every couple of years (eg IronRuby) - it never seems to amount to anything. As with anything MS says, I'll believe it when I see it.

> While this is true, Microsoft is making a big push to get Ruby working more equitably on its platform (for example, they had a heavy presence at Chef Conf)

Having heavy presence at a conference is clearly evidence of trying to get mindshare from users of the thing the conference focuses on, but its less clear that it is evidence of actual concrete work to get the related software working on any platform that you control. Is there really any concrete signs of Microsoft working to get Ruby working better on Windows?

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