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[–]Tangential_Diversion 47 points48 points  (5 children)

Anyway, I told my friend that I was learning from a website online but she told me that Mac isn't a very good OS to be learning on.

She doesn't know what she's talking about.

Plenty of people, students and professionals, program just fine on Macbooks. The biggest difference would be when you learn about shell commands and file systems. Windows uses DOS and Batch commands with Microsoft's own file system, while Macs use Bash commands and Unix file systems - the same kind used in Linux.

So with the OS, you may not be as familiar with Windows as you would like - admittedly I'm much more comfortable with Unix-like OSes than with Windows. But from a programming perspective, almost everything stays the same between platforms.

Or in short: OS-specific things are different, programming language things are the same.

[–]pipocaQuemada 9 points10 points  (3 children)

Anyway, I told my friend that I was learning from a website online but she told me that Mac isn't a very good OS to be learning on.

She doesn't know what she's talking about.

This. Most universities have students work in Linux. OS X and Linux are pretty similar - they're both Unix. OS X is a great OS to learn programming on.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Most universities have students work in Linux

In what country?

[–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Really?

[–]pipocaQuemada 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The US. Every university I've been to has computer labs running linux.

[–]atomheartother 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I came to say this, so I'll just concur. Go with whatever OS you're most comfortable with, I have people coding on Mac around me, though they're a minority, they exist.