I think you are right ... application development under any form of unix,
including Linux, is scarce to the point of being nonexistant. There is an
excellent reason for this. *nix seldom lives on the desktop, so there is
little or no demand for application development, because so few people use
*nix applications.
Obviously one can make a nice living in the *nix world as an administrator.
As a developer one's options are more limited than in the MS world. First
there is no clear biz-wide language comparable to VB.net. For that matter,
there is no OS-wide RAD comparable to Visual Studio. More importantly, there
is no way to quickly whip together a brand-new stand alone application the
way you can with VB.
Here are my impressions of some development realms.
A lot of what passes for application programming in the MS world becomes shell
scripting and glueing in *nix.
Bash|Korn, PERL|Python ~~ VB
It is easier to learn to do this in MS than *nix and you only have to learn
it once.
There is plenty of call for web programming in *nix.
PHP ~~ VB
Each is comparable. Note, however, that when you learn VB for web
programming the fundamentals get reused for application and shell
programming.
Enterprise programming:
DB+SQL dialect+Java+Shell Script+Glue Script
~~ DB+SQL dialect+Java|C#+VB
This actually works better under *nix than Windows.
Kernel, device, and embedded programming.
LOTS of guru level C, maybe some C++ for the lazy, a little assembly
~~ same as *nix.
Probably MORE work using BSD and Linux as embedded operating systems.
Application programming (such as it is in Linux)
Java|(C, C++ ,TCL)|TCL|Thin client (any language + PHP and browser)
~~ Java|C#|(C#, VB)|VB
==================
The big advantages for Windows from an application developer's perspective.
Windows HAS (GUI) applications.
Windows HAS users who consume GUI applications.
Windows has VB, a learn once use everywhere for everything business friendly
language. (That is, programmers with widely varying levels of experience and
talent can be productive using Visual Basic).
Windows has Visual Studio, a learn once RAD environment for all projects in
nearly all OS languages.
On Thursday 2005-09-15 12:42, Josh Coffman wrote:
> 'tag
>
> Here's my dirty little secret. I'm a windows
> developer. I'm pretty good at it and make a good
> living. I've switched to linux at home(except a dual
> boot for some side-work) mostly because I was tired of
> MS annoyances, the cost, and I was generally curious.
>
> One area I've still see MS more favorably is in
> development. Part of that is because I've been doing
> it for a little while. (Ok, maybe more than a little.)
> While I like Eclipse, I haven't seen dev tools that
> come close to Visual Studio even with it's stupid
> annoyances. Although, CVS has got to be better than
> SourceSafe; that's what I call crap.
>
> Also, I have no idea how one would earn a living in
> linux other than network or server admin stuff. So
> please educate me. What do people use develop apps?
> What sort of salaries or contract rates are out there?
> Anyone else ever made the switch from MS-dev to linux
> dev?
>
> -j
>
>
>
>
>
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