Windows 7 and Open Source Programming
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2009-10-22 10:07:07 - Graham EllisWindows 7 went on sale at midnight ... and at ten past, I got my first bulk sales email with a subject line Windows 7 out now - time for a new PC. Slight pity that the graphic on the top of the email still says "PC World Recommends Windows Vista Home Premium" ;-).
But - in all seriousness - how will Windows 7 effect our Open Source training? Not very much, I suspect; the languages we teach in are pretty portable these days - I was writing examples in Unix (Mac OSX), and my delegates were using Windows Vista and Fedora Linux yesterday, and even code such as Expect which used to be notorious for Windows problems was running cross platform. These days, the operating system become less and less relevant - an editor, and the language itself and (unless you write code that says "run this OS command") it will usually run. Google are soon to be bringing out an operating system too ... that will make life interesting, but won't be a show stopper in our business. And I expect I'll be able to report on Windows 7 and how Tcl, Lua, Python, Perl ... run under it in the near future. But I'm not rushing out to the shops today.