Considering a Mac Book Pro

(I hope this is the right forum)
Hello,

I am considering getting a Mac Book Pro 15 inch for college. I will be a Computer Science major and I'm wondering if there's any advantage of using Mac OS X for programming over Windows 7 (Windows will on on the mac regardless). Any thoughts?

No advantage that I can think of. It's really just a matter of personal preference as to which one you want to use. With that said, if you're thinking of going into business developing, the Mac App Store is as much a boon for independent Mac developers as the App Store is for iOS developers.

Thank you.

I'm still interested in a Mac for the build quality though. I might be back to this forum in a year though.

Programming on a Mac

anifan said:

(I hope this is the right forum)
Hello,

I am considering getting a Mac Book Pro 15 inch for college. I will be a Computer Science major and I'm wondering if there's any advantage of using Mac OS X for programming over Windows 7 (Windows will on on the mac regardless). Any thoughts?

Click to expand...

I can't speak for Windows 7, but if you'll be installing it anyway (via Parallels or Bootcamp, or some such), then you'll have the best of both worlds.

Macs ship with PHP, tcl, Perl, Python, and Ruby. If you need a database, Macs ship with MySQL and SQLite. If you want to do web development, Macs ship with Apache2. I repeat: Macs ship with all that preinstalled.

Using XCode (which costs $4.99), you can write C, C++, and Objective C. All the major SCM software programs run on Mac, including SVN, Mercurial, and Git, and there are great GUI software front-ends (I use Tower for Git and Versions for SVN).

Need something more esoteric? Erlang is used in a lot of college CS classes. To install Erlang, first install the Homebrew package manager (package managers are common in the *nix/Linux world; don't know if there's something similar on Windows).

Once Homebrew is installed, installing Erlang is as simple as typing at a command line. Homebrew takes care of downloading and compiling Erlang for the specific OS version and architecture you're running.

(a list of packages available through Homebrew is here: https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/tree/master/Library/Formula/)

Most anything that runs on Unix or a unix-like environment will compile on a Mac.
That, combined with the ability to run Windows at the same time, makes a Mac a great programming tool.

I was going to say it depends on what you're going to be primarily programming in.

Macs can (literally) handle any language. They are especially good for what I shall call "programming for the future" (ie iOS apps, web programming and the better languages around these days). They are not so great if your focus is on Windows apps and while you could certainly do it, not the best bang for your buck in that regard.

Only thing I can say is XCode is nice but for a Variety of languages and Utilities for Programming them you might need windows.