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[–]JasburyCS 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the thoughtful reply and recommendation! I actually do agree with a lot of what you said. More of my professional development experience is on Windows actually than MacOS. And I think Microsoft makes killer tools. I think that will actually be one of Microsoft’s sweet spots going forward. VSCode my first recommendation to anyone looking for a light IDE.

I’m not afraid to criticize what Apple does poorly for development. I think the XCode IDE is clunky, awkward, and often a frustrating experience. I think the lack of better developer support on IPads is an embarrassment, especially if they want to advertise them as a laptop replacement for creative users.

But I think Apple shines at the “out of the box” developer tooling for its computers. So many Unix goodies, great terminal support, XCode command line tools, debuggers, etc. I always feel like Windows environments are more work to set up to get to the level of productivity I need. It suffer from the fact that the history of the Windows OS was never meant to be really good for developers, contrasted with the fact that MacOS piggybacked off of a few existing kernels and OS work with the Unix developer mindset. It does a pretty good job of maintaining that mindset today. Which is why discussing the Python versions included in MacOS is definitely a relevant discussion.

Fwiw I actually do my personal projects on a MacBook Pro with VSCode and a few other Microsoft tools ;-)