Why I’m spending more time in Linux and less in Windows XP
- The ProMepis Linux distribution automatically installs a hardware accelerated OpenGL driver on my laptop
- While the GUI is slower and less polished, I can tweak it to my heart’s content.
- While Firefox is slower, it’s getting faster, and via the magic of Debian packages it’s automagically upgraded to the latest version on a regular basis (along with the rest of the software on my system). For example the HTML rendering component in my current Firefox browser is from February 10th, a mere 7 days ago.
- The following software has become crucial to my project work: Objective Caml, Coin3D, Cairo, LablGL, LablGTK2 (with native code & GtkGLArea support), and MPICH
Each can be installed on a Debian Linux system like ProMepis with one line (“apt-get install [packagename]”). Compare that to how long it would take to get them all installed under Windows XP (hint: I’ve spent many hours trying to get just lablgtk2 working right under either Visual Studio or MingW, to no avail)
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September 19th, 2005 at 6:23 pm
This sorta strikes a chord with me; I’ve fought with e.g.: O’Caml both under Linux and Windows. (My machine is running PPC Ubuntu, pretty much the definition of ‘fringe’ and ‘not so supported’.) Even if I find a system where things would mostly work, I can’t abide by the fact that it is torture on some system – I want other people to be able to use my code! So it very much saddens me that so far, O’Caml, Haskell, Mono etc. all failed my (seemingly simple?!) desire. The only things left are sorta gross: Java, Perl, Python, Scheme, Lisp?
So I’m going to try Scala. If I were smart, I’d just write functional Perl, no?
September 22nd, 2005 at 5:44 pm
I feel your pain. Due to laptop and graphics driver issues I’m mainly back on Windows XP, and issues like the lack of findlib for OCaml for Win32 has put something of a dent in my enthusiasm.
I’d be interested to hear how your adventures go. I’ve never used Scala—have to put that one on the list. I’ve taken a look at Haskell, but had issues with getting the interpreter to work interactively with OpenGL. I haven’t taken a look at mono recently, but .NET/CLR is an extremely interesting environment. You might want to check out F#, a ML variant for .NET.
Does Perl have proper tail recursion? I never even thought to look. I’ve always been turned off by the syntax of Perl, but maybe I should get over it and give it a shot, especially with all the recent cool work on the Parrot VM.