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Thursday, November 10, 2005

Linux: A Programmer's Dream OS

One of the things that attracts me to Linux is the breadth of programming tools/softwares that comes with it.

If I need to program in C, I can use gcc or g++. If I want to program a GUI driven application, I can either program using tcl/tk or I can use gtk with C.

If I am a perl programmer, Linux also comes with it.

If I need a database server, there is postgressql and mysql.

Best of all they are all available for free.

Can you just imagine how many thousands of dollars it would cost if one were to buy each of these softwares?

Another thing is that Linux, along with these programming softwares, come with their source code. If you take the time to study or tinker with them you could really learn a lot.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

not just free of charge but free to use, free to study the code, free to modify and free to redistribute.

IMHO, as a programmer, the gravitating factor of linux is primarily as a server and a staging/development platform rather than a plain desktop.

Let's add to that:

I want to have a web server, there's Apache

I want to maintain source codes, there's CVS and SubVersion

I want to develop like .Net, there's Mono

And last but not the least, my favorite and most common development helper tools: bash, vi and grep

Islam And The West said...

I love linux too. I think it is great or as we say its just the bee's knees.

Anonymous said...

And because everything is open source, you can create a wide range of software for your personal use. Don't feel like using the command line for every single little thing? Write your own GUI frontend for it. I'm just a beginner programmer learning python, and I've already found it "really" easy to get things done by writing my own python and bash programs to do things for me.