I need some help choosing a programming language and a program for my exam's project. I would like to program a piece software, for both Windows and Mac OS X. But I do not know, what lang.

► Green App Machine...

I've worked on both Mac and Windows for awhile. However, I'm still having a hard time understanding why programmers enthusiastically choose Mac OS X over Windows and Linux? I know that there are programmers who prefer Windows and Linux, but I'm asking the programmers who would just use Mac OS X and nothing else, because they think Mac OS X is the greatest fit for programmers. Some might argue that Mac OS X got the beautiful UI and is nix based, but Linux can do that. Although Windows is not nix based, you can pretty much develop on any platform or language, except Cocoa/Objective-C.

Is it the applications that are only available on Mac OS X? Does that really make it worth it? Is it to develop iPhone apps? Mac compatible multimedia projector for business.

Is it because you need to upgrade Windows every 2 years (less backwards compatible)? I understand why people, who are working in multimedia/entertainment industry, would use Mac OS X. However, I don't see what strong merits Mac OS X has over Windows. If you develop daily on Mac and prefer Mac over anything else, can you give me a merit that Mac has over Windows/Linux? Maybe something you can do on Mac that cannot be done in Windows/Linux with the same level of ease?

I'm not trying to do another Mac vs. Windows here. I tried to find things that can be done on Mac but not on Windows with the same level of ease, but I couldn't.

So, I'm asking for some help. @Carson63000: Every time I go to developer conference or hackathons, I only see macbooks.

Probably 5 macbooks to 1 windows laptop (rarely see linux nowadays). These events aren't necessarily for developing the next iPhone or Mac apps. Even when I go to Android conference, all I see is macbook.

I ask people at those events why they use macbooks, and most of them usually think it's just 'cool' to have macbooks or don't know that Windows can do the same thing or even better. I get excited when I see Linux, though. Linux on lenovo laptops ftw! – Feb 25 '11 at 1:51 •. I've been using MacOS X for about half a year on my dev machine and I definitely wound not recommend it to developer, other than iPhone/OSX developers (they don't have a choice, do they?). Apparently I'm not the only one.

All the tools you take for granted in Linux are either non-existent or painful to get to work on OSX: • installing open source software: if you're lucky there's for it. Installing MacPorts feels like Linux 15 years ago. It downloads the package and compiles it. No binary packages. Reserve 5 hours for compilation. If you're not lucky, there is no MacPort for software you're looking for. Then you have to download source and compile it (welcome to 1980's).

Sometimes compilation instructions for OSX 10.5 will work on 10.6, sometimes they won't. • to make things more interesting, there are other alternatives to MacPorts, like and previously. They are not compatible at all with each other, and using more than one of them at time guarantees total chaos and rendering your OSS unusable. • multi-screen support: hey, looking for your IDE's menu? It's on main screen, not the one you're working on.

You can get lame 'solution' for that, called. It will be ugly, unresponsive and at times will display bunch of 'N/A' instead of menu. But it's OSX so who'd care about ergonomy when you can have eyecandy.

I mean, if you'd like interface designed about ppl who care about HCI, you'd choose Linux or Win7 anyway. ( Update: this seems to be finally fixed in Mavericks, even though last 2 years I've been told numerous times that it would contradict 'the Mac way'). Ddj sx2 driver for mac. • decent terminal: you have few choices, the default Terminal.app, the iTerm and dozen others. None of them has full feature set (comparing to default consoles in Linux), each of them has at least one of the problems (like messed up line wrapping, no tab support or problems with UTF-8). • GCC 4.2 is included. But wait, why doesn't it understand GCC 4.2 x86_64 flags like -march=native?