Ironpython book?

[Alex Martelli]

Diez B. Roggisch <deets at nospam.web.de> wrote:

> > I suspected. I've played with Linux distros, but never a Mac. That
> > takes more $$ than M$, 

Find me a 2-kg, 5+ battery hours, well-heeled laptop (with wifi, 801b,
etc etc) below the $999 of the iBook G4... it's hard today, it was just
imposible back when I bought mine in 2003. I intended to load Linux on
it (i.e., I bought it strictly for the nonpareil HW price/performance),
and I know a few people who do that, but that was before I found out how
well MacOSX works.  IOW, Apple is very price-competitive _in the niches
it plays in_ -- it just doesn't play in many "cheap and nasty" niches
(such as, 4-kg, hardly-any-battery-life laptops;-).

> > and Apple is even more proprietary than MS, if
> > you ask me. 
> 
> Depends. Sure, if you dive into Cocoa programming and stuff. But you have to

...which is hardly "more proprietary than MS", anyway, since OpenStep
does live, btw;-).

> keep in mind that under the hood it's BSD - and even runs a X-Server if you
> want to. So I can use all my Linux staples + have a fancy OS for
> multimedia-stuff.

For me, just like for most people I've discussed it with, the reasoning
is similar.  For example, Chip Turner (once of RedHat, and a major
contributor to RPM tools, now a colleague at Google) blogs at
<http://other-eighty.blogspot.com/> and has a few notes on the matter
(e.g. "there's nothing like sitting in the middle of a meeting and
having the ONLY WORKING LAPTOP in the room. Wireless AND suspend, both
working..." -- that's about his Powerbook;-). I'd say Chip mostly
switched from Linux to Mac for the same reason he mostly switched from
Perl to Python though he was a CPAN contributor too. Others feel even
more strongly: e.g., Rob Pike, another colleague, apparently just
dislikes Linux technically (mostly, I think, X11, but not just that) and
that's why he uses Macs (Windows isn't even in the picture, of course).


> > It interests me how many Open Source advocates and
> > anti-Microsoft folks are willing to pay top dollar for Macs, which I
> > guess means that, for them, it's less a Cathedral vs. Bazaar thing and
> > more about It Works vs. It Doesn't?
> 
> I can't comment on this in general, but on the CCC (Chaos Communication
> Congress, a Hacker-con) last year the notebook-distribution was like this:
> 
> 30% Macs
> 30% ThinkPads
> 40% rest

Not too different from what you see, e.g., at OSCON, though there may be
more Macs there.  At Google meetings the distribution is more like
45-45-10, since Macs and Thinkpads are the laptop brands Google gives
its employees for work use (and few bother to apply for a third
alternative when they can just pick up either at a "tech stop").

But, sure, here we're talking about people who are primarily engineers,
so the main ethos is indeed "it works/it doesn't". Opensource tends to
work better (and indeed many of Mac's advantages come from its BSD
underpinnings)...

> So - it seems that quality is important, and of course any decent Hacker
> will run a *nixish OS.

Not necessarily: Tim Peters, among my top choices for "top Hacker in the
PSF" Lifetime Award, prefers Windows.  So, s/any/most/...!-)


Alex