Whither Windows?

I bought a shiny 13” MacBook Pro last week. It’s the second mac I’ve bought in the last year (the other being an iMac). If myself from five years ago were around, he’d probably be bonking me in the head with a foam rubber bat right now. I used to really dislike Apple, and their stuff1. So what happened?

Well, I’ve been thinking about software development recently. One of the more interesting things I’ve come to realize is that once you get out of the .NET world, there really isn’t very much interesting stuff going on with Windows. Java? I don’t particularly care for it, but you can do that on just about anything. Web apps like Rails/Django/etc? Windows is an afterthought, and often a pain to use. Mobile apps? Well maybe Windows Phone 7 will work out, but they have their work cut out for them. All of the less popular and geekier languages (mainly the various Lisps) don’t really work that great on Windows either.

So really, if I want to push my boundaries out just a little bit beyond C#, what other options are out there?

1. And really, some of their practices today are just ridiculous. If someone else could build the same quality of hardware as them, and keep 3rd parties from messing it up, they might just be in trouble…

Written by Scott Williams who lives and works in sunny Phoenix, AZ. Twitter is also a place.