I have no doubt that developers are a much larger proportion of Linux users (approaching 100%) than they are of Windows users. I suspect that may also be true for OS X users. But there's simply a huge, huge number of Windows users and consequently, a huge, huge number of Windows-based developers. Not necessarily bound up in the Microsoft ecosystem (.NET and the like), but developing on Windows.
But HNers, who are bound up with a tight-knit community that consists mostly of open source software, Github etc., quite naturally assume that they are representative. (Sidenote: Git and Github also have minority version-control market share. I would not be surprised if the biggest version control out there was no version control at all.)
In reality, I would be shocked if Linux/OS X-primary developers constituted more than one-third of total developers. Unfortunately, accurate statistics are hard to come by.
It's not that "nobody runs Windows", it's that "relatively few people who would find snazzy new IE features useful" run Windows.
This is the point issue: "but that it doesn't run on Mac OS or GNU/Linux"
The parent is arguing that IE needs to be cross platform for Mac OS and GNU/Linux. I'm curious if there is data to support that as IE's biggest issue.
What I'm seeking to clarify from the parent, is the data to support the premise that Windows, despite having upwards of 90% of the market share of the environment being discussed, somehow has a small share of developers compared to eg GNU/Linux (which has 2% of said market share among users). I'm skeptical of that extreme ratio falling so much between usage share and developer share, that it supports the parents position that IE's big problem is that it needs to be cross-platform.
They were responding to glesica's assertion that the reason nobody cares about IE is that it isn't cross-platform. To counter this assertion, adventured said that 90% of the desktop/laptop market uses Windows, so it seems unreasonable that the majority of people would not have access to IE as a reason for not using it.
Adventured was not suggesting that 90% of people are using IE; they were suggesting the exact opposite and asking why that is, because glesica's reasoning seems intuitively flawed.
I can benefit all available *nix tools in it's native state ( not run by cygwin ).
I doubt there is statistics for this, but in my mind OS X is the most popular OS that people are doing web-development on.
Although I like what Microsoft are doing lately with TypeScript and many more additions to open source community, it is really hard for me to imagine a switch.
Like you say, it's incredibly difficult to pull any solid numbers for this - Github isn't even close to representative, web server hosting is skewed by domain parking, pretty much any statistic you can come up with to support any side, at least that I can think of, is going to have major problems.
But Windows-based developers have an entirely different workflow that completely obviates the need for Linux tools. Sometimes the workflow is different enough so you genuinely don't need it - the average ASP.NET developer probably doesn't have any need for them. Sometimes the developer just doesn't know any better - and you see that kind on all systems. Sometimes they've developed a PowerShell proficiency or something that lets them use analogous tools in an analogous ways. But this just isn't an argument. It's effectively saying, "well, if you do web development like I do, you need *nix." Well, of course! :) For most of them, it would be equally unimaginable to switch. I think there's very few like me, who have actively done and enjoyed both professionally.
There are, of course, exceptions: I think we can all agree that almost all ASP.NET developers are on Windows and almost all Ruby developers are on OS X or maybe Linux. Most of the amateurs are certainly on Windows - I don't mean that in a disparaging way, I just mean the people just starting out and putting together very simple, possibly static webpages, or playing around with whatever their CMS has set up for them. Then you have all the enterprisey web development, likely mostly internal sites, with somewhat less of a skew, but still probably majority Windows. For the professional, public-facing sort of stuff, I expect its a lot closer to 50/50. Of course, just like you say, it's very hard to demonstrate anything and anecdote-by-anecdote and gut-feeling doesn't really say much.
* bash
* all the GNU tools (grep, less, ...)
* vim
* emacs
* npm
* all the npm tools (gulp, grunt, &c; everything installable through npm)
* gcc
* make
* IntelliJ
* ssh (command line or putty)
It's all here. Without cygwin. The only problem I ever have is performance of the FS on many small files. That's just terrible.
If your corporate policy even allowed that. :P
but Android/Linux is ~50%, and Windows/IE on a phone is 2%.
The parent is talking about developers, and arguing that IE's biggest problem is that it's not cross-platform, and that it needs to be on Mac OS and GNU/Linux because far more developers use those now vs Windows.
My question is: is that true, that IE's biggest problem is the need to be on Mac OS and Linux (emphasis that we're not talking about iOS and Android); and is it true that far more developers (and particularly those relevant to this) are on non-Windows platforms now vs on Windows.
I'm willing to wager the radical majority of developer work occurs not on a smartphone, but on a desktop or laptop. Whether we're talking coding, design or otherwise. Even the work for smartphone software occurs almost entirely off of a smartphone (with the phone mostly used for testing).
GNU/Linux is ~2% of the market.