The proper basis for a marriage is mutual misunderstanding - Oscar Wilde
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Apple's Mac OS X helps BSD overtake Linux for development
THE LURE of shiny toys has helped Apple's BSD-based Mac OS X operating system overtake Linux to become the operating system that is the second most used by developers, according to Evans Data.
Analyst outfit Evans Data reports that in North America over 80 per cent of developers still run their integrated development environments (IDEs) in Microsoft's Windows operating system. As surprising and concerning as that might be, the biggest surprise is the growing popularity of Apple's Mac OS X, with Evans Data claiming that 7.9 per cent of developers are using it as a host operating system, pushing it past Linux, which is used by 5.6 per cent of developers surveyed.
Janel Garvin, CEO of Evans Data said, "Apple has made tremendous strides in the last few years with innovative products and technologies, so it's quite reasonable to see developers adopting the Mac and its OS as a development environment."
Apple's Mac OS X is based on the Mach BSD 4.4 kernel and arguably represents the easiest, albeit most costly, non-Windows alternative. It offers stability, a highly polished user interface and perhaps most importantly the choice of Vim, Emacs or Eclipse. The fact that Apple's shiny toys are selling well definitely helps its popularity among developers of IOS applications, but it could well be developers just wanting a quick and relatively painless way out of using Microsoft's Windows operating system that drives its success.
Some developers are forced to use Microsoft Windows because they work with the .Net framework. However doing development on systems running Linux was always seen to be a safe bet, simply because Linux has in the past been far more stable than Windows. To Microsoft's credit, the stability of Windows has improved a great deal in the past decade and Windows 7 is on the whole also a stable desktop operating system.
The irony in all this is that Evans Data's data shows that while Linux fans have been talking about the death of BSD for well over a decade, it seems that thanks to Apple, BSD in the form of Mac OS X appears to have overtaken Linux in one usage metric. ยต
Tags: Apple
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@Hexx - me too - Vim is a scouring powder, Eclipse is a camera lens cleaner - Maybe Emacs is a hair removal product for nerds....?
I don't know how Linux and the BSDs could be considered at war. Maybe a friendly shoving match, at most. Their antithesis was and remains the commercial closed-source proprietary software corporation. That's the battlefield.
As for emacs / vi jokes, I didn't realize that anyone thought they were still topical. Our author has obviously been swatting.
Even better to understand Rick Rashid bridging Mach Kernel/OS X and Microsoft Research. Maybe there is a reason why Windows became more stable in the past decade? ;)
The real reason is not only Mach/BSD, but the whole NeXT platform, great grandfather of OS X, which had the whole integration thing even for coding/code generation about 20 years ago, but nobody wanted it.
It would be more accurate to say that Mac OS X is based on Mach which was a kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon.
You can read more about it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel)
And, no, I am not a CMU alumnus.
This might happen because of gnome 3 that came out and ubuntu's unity. Almost no one like those desktop interfaces
That's the way the world works: you become what you resist. An important company in the /personal/ computer revolution now utterly relies on what it revolted against: UNIX.
By the way, fanboys, without BSD that it got public domain, Apple would have NOTHING.
@hexx: I think that just means Unix types will still have their favorite horrible text editor with an Apple system.
trying to understand what exactly do you mean by this: "and perhaps most importantly the choice of Vim, Emacs or Eclipse."