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Programing on a mac

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17 Feb 2010, 1:17 am

In the past 2 weeks, I have gone from being an unemployed college student, to having a full time temporary job, picking up two independent contractor jobs, tutoring a handful of students, and being a full time student myself. I need to get a laptop to give me access to a computer whenever I have a free minute to work on homework or the independent contracting stuff I have going.

My obsession is programing. Specifically Java, but I hope to get into other languages as well (right now I am doing some VB, VBA, ASP, Javascript, objective C, and html). I NEED a computer that I can code on in a variety of languages.

Everyone I know who has had a mac notebook has been extremely satisfied with it, Most people with a PC laptop have issues with it. So I'm leaning towards a mac.

But these are not programmers. Does anyone know how it is to develop software on a mac? (I know about xCode, and I've seen eclipse has a mac version). Is it pretty versatile? I have a PC desktop, running windows 7, which I would need to go back and forth between (I do have a mac VM on my PC).

recommendations?



Orwell
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17 Feb 2010, 1:45 am

Mac OS X is, at its core, a fully POSIX-compliant, BSD-based UNIX system. You can definitely program on a Mac, and actually it is probably a better choice for programming than Windows. I think about half the computer science faculty at my university are Mac users, and a fair number of the rest are Linux users- not Windows.


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Scientist
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17 Feb 2010, 7:20 am

Mac is a really good choice for programming.
I have used Xcode for programming in C+ for a while, but most of the time I use Matlab for programming on my Mac. All my colleagues in my branch of science (experimental psychology: psychophysics) use Macs for programming and running experiments and analysing data as it is better than using a PC and Windows.


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computerlove
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17 Feb 2010, 9:59 am

Orwell wrote:
Mac OS X is, at its core, a fully POSIX-compliant, BSD-based UNIX system. You can definitely program on a Mac, and actually it is probably a better choice for programming than Windows. I think about half the computer science faculty at my university are Mac users, and a fair number of the rest are Linux users- not Windows.
seconded.
Plus, ladies will love it. Prepare to get laid, a lot ;)


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alex
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17 Feb 2010, 10:50 am

computerlove wrote:
Orwell wrote:
Mac OS X is, at its core, a fully POSIX-compliant, BSD-based UNIX system. You can definitely program on a Mac, and actually it is probably a better choice for programming than Windows. I think about half the computer science faculty at my university are Mac users, and a fair number of the rest are Linux users- not Windows.
seconded.
Plus, ladies will love it. Prepare to get laid, a lot ;)


qft



tttnjfttt
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17 Feb 2010, 11:02 am

computerlove wrote:
Plus, ladies will love it. Prepare to get laid, a lot ;)


Now if only I were a guy, that could be very useful.



LordoftheMonkeys
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17 Feb 2010, 11:22 am

On a Mac you will generally find compilers and interpreters for C, C++, Java, Ruby, Perl, Python, and Applescript, as well as Javascript through whatever browser you're using. There are also several Unix scripting languages you have access to, including bash, sed, awk, flex, bison, make, bc, expect, and m4. On the other hand, if you want to program on Windows, you pretty much invariably have to pay for it.



Orwell
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17 Feb 2010, 10:27 pm

computerlove wrote:
Plus, ladies will love it. Prepare to get laid, a lot ;)

Apple needs to hire you as their head of marketing. I can see the ads now: "The iPad gets you laid."


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tttnjfttt
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18 Feb 2010, 12:57 am

Orwell wrote:
computerlove wrote:
Plus, ladies will love it. Prepare to get laid, a lot ;)

Apple needs to hire you as their head of marketing. I can see the ads now: "The iPad gets you laid."

The iPad is evidence enough of their male dominated marketing crew
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsjU0K8QPhs[/youtube]



tttnjfttt
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22 Feb 2010, 1:17 pm

I LOVE my new mac! this is one sweet computer. I ended up with a 15" MacBook pro. Eclipse (The SDK i use for Java) installed without an issue. X code was a nice easy install as well. So far it has been a very smooth transition.