The term “hackers” can conjure images of teenager misfits, breaking into your credit card account in order to get into porn sites on the web. But these days when you talk about hackers your talking about those programmers that can make software sing. They take open source code and turn it into main-stream applications.
So what are hackers using for their “weapon of choice”? Well according to Tim O’Reilly from O’Reilly Books, and Paul Graham, author and programmer, it’s the Mac OSX. Why you may ask? Well according to Paul Graham in his essay “Return of the Mac”.
All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple’s low point in the mid 1990s. They’re about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get.
The reason, of course, is OS X. Powerbooks are beautifully designed and run FreeBSD. What more do you need to know? For most of us, it’s not a switch to Apple, but a return. Hard as this was to believe in the mid 90s, the Mac was in its time the canonical hacker’s computer.
The comments made by Tim O’Reilly are very similar.
There have been an amazing number of iBooks at recent O’Reilly conferences. The adoption by key OSS communities and leaders is also striking. For example: most of the Perl core team is now on OS X; James Gosling, Duncan Davidson, and a lot of other key Java developers; P2P developers; many of the key developers in bioinformatics (a very important new field involving the application of computer power to gene research and related areas). All are heavily into OS X.
One reason is what I call “guilt-free computing.” Even hackers need to deal with office apps. (A few years ago I switched from Unix to Windows for a lot of my computing — with MKS toolkit for continued access to Unix utilities — because of the number of Word and Excel files I had to deal with.) But everyone except the most diehard free software advocates tends to run dual-boot PCs with Linux or FreeBSD AND Windows. And they’d look guiltily over their shoulder whenever they were using Windows in public. With OS X, you get the best of both worlds in a guilt-free package! Plus Office apps, a modern GUI, and all the power of Unix development and scripting tools.
Whether you are on the Apple or PC side of the fence, these two articles are worth the read. You know I run a Mac and publish a Mac Switcher website at Surf-bits.com, but I also have a PC and have run PC’s for the last 15 years or more. Hardware is hardware, but the one item that draws me to the Mac is the OSX software. It’s head and shoulders above other operating systems I’ve run. If you consider yourself a true Geek, then do yourself a favor and run OSX for a while and see what you think.