Is a MacBook Pro good for programming? How good is a MacBook Pro for general purpose programming?
A MacBook Pro is fantastic for some kinds of programming, and if you want to write iOS apps or macOS apps (or for some reason TVos or watchOS apps) a Mac of some short is really the only choice.If you want to write Windows programs a MacBook Pro is a “meh” choice. You will have to run windows, and what makes a MacBook of any sort special is largely lost at that point. It’ll arguably look nicer then most windows laptops, and have better components then many (but not all), but really if you want to write Windows apps you probably don’t want to pay extra for the macOS you are not using.If you want to write Unixey server applications it is a fine choice, it runs Unix in an of itself so you can do some local development. It’ll get nice battery life, and is a good size and weight. You get to use macOS while you are at it which is nice. You might also find a Windows laptop that can do all that, and it might be cheaper (and you might like the look more, or less). You can also find a whole lot of bad windows laptops. Alternately you could get a laptop to run Linux on (and again you could do that on a Mac, but you lose most of the value), most people are not supper happy with the result. Lots of “new” Mac users come from people that previously had run Linux or BSD on a laptop and like the Mac more because they can do just as much “Unix stuff”, but actually have a nice functioning desktop without constant messing about.If you want to write Android apps it also works pretty well (as would Windows, so you could more or less copy the windows part of the paragraph above).I personally would use a MacBook Pro (or other MacBook) in preference to a Windows laptop for programming unless I was planning on doing a lot of Windows work (and I would still pick it for a mixed workload that included iOS or macOS work plus Windows work).Well, that or an iMac, if you don’t need portability an iMac is pretty nice. A much bigger display then any MacBook has ever had (unless you use an external monitor).
Why do you use Linux?
The first time I ever used Linux was in 2014. Back then, I owned a very low-end laptop which had a core2duo processor and ran on Windows XP. My laptop was sluggishly slow and it drove me crazy. As a solution, a friend of mine suggested to switch to a lightweight Linux distro which might help me get the most out of my outdated laptop. I went with Ubuntu because I conveniently found its iso file on one of the PCs at Uni.So yeah, the first time I ever used Linux was because I wanted to make my laptop go faster, and it kind of worked! Moreover, it came with everything essential right out of the box - A whole office suite (LibreOffice), a good text editor for coding and even a torrent client.Now, I’ll be honest here - I initially used Linux partially because it made me look cool among my class-mates *wink wink*. I was the only one with a Ubuntu laptop, and everybody had so many questions!The second time I installed Linux was in an old laptop my dad brought home from work. I revived the ancient one with Manjaro Linux, a super light-weight distro usually used for net-books:I loved the fact how Linux allowed room for customization and offered so many different flavors. After getting a new high-end laptop in 2015, I installed Elementary OS, which totally looked like a Mac interface:I think the first time I ever realized the true power and utility Linux provided was when I started tinkering with the Terminal. The moment I figured out how to use wild-cards to do things like “locating all files in a directory whose name starts with the letter m or has a specific extension” was truly satisfying! The day I started shell-scripting is another story.Edit: My first answer with 200+ Upvotes! Thanks guys! Linux ftw!
What can I do/build with Python? Is Python better for certain programming needs? What can you/can't you do with Python?
Python allows you to do many cool things. Do you want to build a website with a backend , Python has Django/Flask to support it. Do you want to build a GUI application(i.e a desktop app) , Python has pyQt/Tkinter for it. Do you want to predict stocks for the next few days based on the previous years data, Python has scikit-learn for it. Do you want to take screenshots of 100 webpages without visiting them manually , python has Selenium for it. The applications are endless. I will list down some of the famous libraries and their applications.1. Web development :- You can develop a website with a backend supporting REST api using python frameworks such as Django / Flask.2. Game development :- You can develop a Video game using module Pygame3. Computer Vision :- You can do interesting things such as Face detection, Color detection using Opencv with python4. Web scraping :- Want to get data from a website but the website doesn't have an api to expose data, you can use scraping. Most of the News aggregators, e-commerceprice comparison websites such as buyhatke do web scraping.Python has Requests, BeautifulSoup , Scrapy to support webscraping.5. Machine Learning :- You can do cool things such as predicting stocks, finger print identification, spam detection etc. using machine learning. Python has modules scikit-learn , theano, tensorflow to support it. Currently Deep Learning is all the hype and tensorflow has support for Deep Learning.6. GUI development :- To develop a cross-platform desktop application python can be used. Python has modules Tkinter, PyQt to support it.7. Robotics :- Raspberry pi can be used as a brain to the robot to perform various actions and to react to the environment and the coding on a Raspberry pi can be done using python.8. Data Analysis :- Data whenever obtained either online or offline would not be properly formatted with various issues such as missing values etc. This data can be cleaned using Pandas. And to find patterns from the data Matplotlib can be used in visualizing the data. These are used as a first step in machine learning before applying any ML algo.9. Browser Automation :- Cool things such as opening a browser and posting a fb status can be done using Selenium with python.PS :- You can follow my blog here Coding experiments . I blog about the various cool things that can be done with coding (including Python).