I think that my major school on computing comes from Unix & Linux. Unix and derived operating systems are really cool, they have a lot of data processing tools for the command line and software development. They come at least with one language interpreter called Awk or better suited comes with Perl, so you can easily automate system tasks. So, Unix systems are really more developer friendly, rather than user friendly operating systems. With many tools that are freely available to extend the operating system and make it fit your data processing needs, without too much licensing problems.
An example of a good placed Unix system is Mac OS X, it has several command line tools to automate the operating system and make it friendly and its native development environment called X Code is very easy to acquire, without too much problems. It is a real programmer environment. Flexible enough to be customized, with various tools that allows you to program the environment, automate tasks and make life really more easier. For example while I’m programming and I want to seek source code with log lines, I use a single command line pipe to filter log messages, as follows.
$ find . -type f -name '*.py' -exec grep -nHi 'l.debug' {} ; | sed '/exc/d;'
On Windows and similar operating systems, which are specially made for users, rather than developers, I feel really truncated because I cannot do stuff like that. So, I become less productive under Windows and I hate it. Things that should be solved quickly with few command line and editor hooks — like Emacs provides me for editing automation — are delayed under Windows because it does not support that kind of stuff. What’s better than having an editor with an embedded Lisp interpreter? What’s better than having Perl and Awk among a lot of command line tools that allows me to automate any task that I want?
The same happens on its browser. Internet Explorer does not have enough tools for Web Development like others have. On Firefox and Google Chrome we have very nice development tools, allowing us to create amazing DHTML / AJAX based applications, among other stuff like building amazing HTML 5 and WebGL applications. I find really frustrating any work made under Internet Explorer. If you want to debug a simple JavaScript implementation — which is not really JavaScript under windows and it is dialect called JScript — you need to launch a whale called Visual Studio. So, to become productive developing Internet Explorer applications, you must pay for something that will be used with a 10% of its capacity, including the licensing cost of Visual Studio.
So, for me Windows, Internet Explorer, and related technologies are a mere gaming console, rather than a developer friendly environment. That is why I dislike using Windows and developing systems for that operating system, because it is poor, overfilled with useless ornaments rather than useful tools.
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in the general all what you say about tools for development between *nix and win is rigth and there nothing to say.
But in defense of IE, from the IE9 they are making a little better. Specially because it has a little more decent developer tool even it let you browse like IE7, IE8.
Yes it’s not the best but at least has one, and has one before Firefox. They added recently few days a development tool, before it rest that function in plugins like the famous firebug. Not in the browser itself.