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> The minimum requirement for a language to take off: first class Windows support

many open source languages “made it” without this qualification, and I’d suggest that Microsoft has a long history of primarily supporting its ecosystem languages on its platform.



Can you name a language that “made it” and what you mean by “make it”?


Bash? Ruby earlier on? Node earlier on? Erlang? Elixir? Perl, earlier on? Clojure? Go earlier on? All the standard Unix utilities and their DSL's? (sed, awk, bc, jq, etc.) Apple's Objective-C/Cocoa, and Swift? Rust (earlier on)? Scala? Haskell?

Every one of these languages' Windows support tends to lag their *nix support, and most are fairly widely deployed (my definition of "making it"). Many may support Windows now to some degree, but did not originally and not for their entire incubation period.

Early Python did not have good Windows support. Neither did PHP... which is exactly why Microsoft basically copied PHP to make ASP.

Hell, even C/C++ was basically fleshed out on Unixes long before Windows even existed.

Linux (and Unix flavors before it, as well as things like BSD) is the premiere developer OS, period. It enjoys, by far, the most languages to choose from. Windows is the developer OS only for the Windows ecosystem of technologies, which is far too limiting IMHO.

The fact that you've even asked this question makes me think you are living under a Redmond rock.

If you didn't have access to WSL, you wouldn't even be able to fully enjoy most of these languages. Which is exactly why WSL exists! No one would need it otherwise!

In fact, the only open-source language I can think of that DID premiere with first-class Windows support was Java.


I'm not sure, but I would be surprised if early node had good windows support before it became big.


Right, which is why I said “Node earlier on” (as in, without good Windows support yet)




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