Never thought I would say that, but I must confess. I’ve learned to
enjoy Windows, thanks to Mark Hammond and the great stuff he does with
Python on Windows.
Here’s an email I’ve sent recently to the zope-dev mailing list, I
thought it would be cool to share it:
On Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 04:37:12PM +0100, Andreas Jung wrote: | >I'll repeat or emphasis that the windows release process needs to | >be simple enough that *I* can do it. | | Well, that's a perfect goal :-) But my experience with doing slightly | simple programming tasks on Windows is that Windows will slap you wherever | possible - even when you're trying to solve simple problems. I stopped | dreaming that anything on Windows works as it should. I'll add to that that I used to think this way, too, but Mark Hammond slowly convinced me otherwise. Today I have the opinion that no matter what other people say, Windows is actually superior to *anything* I've seen in Linux or OS X, except for the networking stack and process management. COM, for example, is very cool stuff. You should see some of the stuff Mark has done that allows one to call pretty much any Python object via COM from any language that supports COM as long as the Python object has a interface declaration using 'zope.interface'. I'm still waiting to see something like COM on the Linux world. Over with the bashing, back to the topic now. -- Sidnei da Silva Enfold Systems, LLC. http://enfoldsystems.com
Sidnei Silva 
there are other component technologies out there
COM is not the only component technology out there. Have you heard of CORBA? (It runs on Linux too). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_componentry for an overview of the available technologies.
of course
Yeah, I know CORBA. But a component architecture is nothing without components. Best I can tell, CORBA is pretty much abandoned these days.
The problem as I see it is that Linux doesn’t have yet agreed on a standard component architecture. KDE has DCOP, Gnome has bonobo, and now there’s also D-BUS. It will take a while until we get mature components for some enterprise-level tasks.
Hello!
I am tempted to reply to this with a screed about how awful Windows is (and I can’t resist this one snark: it’s not just the networking; have you ever SEEN how badly Windows’ filesystem performs???)
I’ll try to resist others though, and say: Hello! Twisted needs a Windows maintainer badly. Are you interested? :)
twisted, filesystems
I’m not Mark Hammond-level on Windows expertise, but I surely hope to get there someday. Then I could volunteer for mantaining twisted on Windows.
As for filesystems, I haven’t benchmarked anything but certainly NTFS feels faster than OS X’s HFS+/UFS. ;)
COM is good because Microsoft has complete control…
Microsoft can make their own standards, because every Windows developer will use them. The same applies to Apple. Linux has competing standards, and some developers have giant egos. Such developers can’t stand using what’s already there, they want to build a better alternative. I’m not saying it’s always bad.
wtf?
Dude I seriously wish you would get a clue.
Do you like anything else than COM?
Yes, having lots functionality from other Windows programs and Windows services available via COM and making functionality available that way is pretty cool. I think .NET is even cooler and it looks like Microsoft is seriously propagating IronPython as a first class .NET platform language. That rocks.
Component models are not everything, though. And it’s not like OSX or KDE don’t have a component model either which brings me to the question: Do you like anything else about Windows other than COM? There’s not too much more to like I’ve found.
Ego vs Profit
What’s worse, an ego-driven standard, or one that will ultimately be leveraged in every possible way to wring as much money out of you as possible? I’d rather not use a component architecture that only works on one OS — and a commercial one at that.
So?
"Linux" is hardly a complete platform. It’s scarcely even a meaningful word, let alone a development target. "KDE" is a platform comparable to Windows, and (as you note) it *does* have a standard component architecture, as well as a boatload of excellent components. Better yet and unlike COM, you can run it on a wide range of hardware and OS environments. IIUC, you can even use DCOP components on Windows, if you are so pathologically inclined.
Saying Windows is better than Linux or *BSD is a bit like saying wagons are better than wheels.