I just read and reposted Chen Hao’s “Unix Is Actually Simple”, and it changed my mind.
I now think programming on Windows may have little future, for these reasons:
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Today’s user interfaces are dominated by two things: 1) the web, and 2) mobile — iOS or Android. Windows’ graphical interface isn’t in favor anymore.
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More and more enterprises are building their systems on low-cost, high-performance Linux and open source technology. Windows costs too much.
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Microsoft changes things too fast and nothing lasts — they’re just toying with programmers. See A Brief History of the Windows Programming Revolution for details.
So my own view is that the trend is web plus mobile on the front end, Linux plus open source on the back end. There’s basically no place for Windows in development.
At school I learned C#/.NET, so I bought Windows hosting — though it supports PHP too, since this WordPress blog is PHP. I actually quite like the Linux + PHP combination. It’s just that everyone around me uses Windows. I installed Ubuntu once, but it wasn’t very usable and differed too much from what I was used to; things like QQ didn’t work well on it, so I went back to Windows.
Torn.