August 5, 2008

Default Languages on Linux, Mac, Windows

Mark Damon Hughes:
"All Linux distributions ship with: Python, Perl, C, and C++"

"A standard install of Mac OS X Leopard has: Python, Perl, Java, Ruby, AppleScript"

"MS Windows ships with nothing. No BASIC. No C compiler. You're trapped, stuck playing with Solitaire and MS Paint"

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

So? As with any OS you occasionally have to install stuff. :)

Davy Mitchell said...

WRONG - Windows does come with VBScript which is pretty powerful even if old...

tshirtman said...

Well if the windows installation was bloated with an msoffice installation you can find visual basic under the hood, not that I would {like,recommend} to use that anyway...

[joke]oh it's probably because windows is for serious people actually producing something... not learning to hack...[/joke]

Anonymous said...

You can use vbscript or jscript on a standard Windows install.

Corey Goldberg said...

OK.. so vbscript and jscript are available. Where's the popular cross platform languages and tools?

Unknown said...

What percentage of Windows users actually want to write code in ANY language? Everybody bitches about Windows bloat, but then complains when the Microsofties cut out something they wanted.

Anonymous said...

But many PCs come preloaded with Python for the same reasons Debian developpers like it better.

On the thinkpad I'm writing this comment Python 2.2 is actually the scripting language picked by IBM to boot and control the *installation* of Windows itself.

Anonymous said...

Ah, but you can program in Piet on MS Paint!

http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html

Stephen Thorne said...

This has always been a serious concern of mine.

Many of my peers when I was hacking away in perl and bash on my linux machine when I was a little tyke were cutting their teeth on 'mirc script' and writing large programs in a language that would subsequently damage them so badly they would never want to program again.

SDC said...

It seems to be a cultural thing...almost nobody on the Windows side writes code, and admins that can cobble together something in VBScript are viewed with awe by their peers. Meanwhile while few sysadmins on the UNIX side necessarily call themselves programmers, they pretty much all have some level of competence w/ Perl, or, increasingly lately, Python.

Another thing, MS put out that 'Powershell' thing recently, I guess to make the people who bothered with VBScript feel x-tra dum or something...

SDC said...

clarification, I meant admins on the Windows side. Obviously all those windows folks with Visual Studio are writin some code.

_lowell said...

Doesnt Windows ship with the .NET Framework? If you go the Framework's folder under the /Windows folder and select any available version, you will see a few .exe files. Two of them are compilers! :) csc.exe for C# and vbc.exe for VBasic .NET. I used to work in a call center a long time ago and would amuse myself by writing little apps when it was slow. I learned C# that way, ghetto like, with Notepad and cmd.exe. These days, its much of the same, bash and TextMate. :)

est said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
est said...

Windows has Javascript in WScript, also support COM+

Neither Linux nor Mac could do that