That’s what a lot of people in my field ask me, since I’m a programmer who prefers to use Mac. I actually used Windows exclusively for a very long time until an IT Director from a previous programming position talked me into trying Mac OS X, which was his preferred system. I still use a Windows PC on occasion for certain things, but there are many reasons Mac is my preferred system for programming, as I’ll explain shortly.

Most everybody knows that Windows is still the most popular choice in the personal computer market. Linux, however, is by far the most popular choice for web server applications, though it has not gained popularity as a personal computer choice. If Linux were to have a GUI as feature rich and powerful as that of OS X and Windows 7, and better support for some of the more common desktop applications (although support for many applications is growing), I believe it would be a very popular choice for a desktop system if not the most popular choice. Since I do programming mostly in a LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) application architecture, I work pretty heavily in Linux web servers. I’m one who would probably use Linux as my desktop system if it had those features mentioned above.

What I didn’t realize before, and a lot of other heavy Linux users may not realize, is that Mac OS X is the best of both worlds – a powerful GUI and a Linux-like command line interface. Apple’s OS is built on certain parts of FreeBSD’s and NetBSD’s implementation of Unix, so the standard Unix facilities are available from the command line interface as they are in Linux. So the commands, operations, bash scripting, cronjobs, etc., that I use regularly on Linux are exactly the same, for the most part, on OS X. Therefore, programming on Mac OS X is a lot like programming on a Linux web server but Mac is also an amazing desktop system as well.

The following is a small list of some of the reasons why I think Mac OS X = awesome:

• SSH – secure shell remote connection

  It couldn’t be simpler to use SSH on Mac to log in to a remote web server, since SSH is built into the OS. Just use the following command in terminal – ssh user@remote_host. There are also tons of other commands that can be used jointly with SSH

• SCP/RSYNC – secure copy and data transfer

  Unix-based systems talk to each other very well. And as such, it is incredibly easy to copy files securely from my desktop to a remote web server using the simple command scp local_dir/local_file user@remote_host:/remote_dir OR from a remote web server to my desktop using scp user@remote_host:/remote_dir/remote_file local_dir

• GREP – global regular expression print

  It is extremely useful to find my previously written code by searching through files for matching regular expression patterns. GREP has saved me hours of searching and hours of re-writing code. I just use the command grep -rn ‘regexp’ *

• PHP/PERL

  One of my favorite things about Mac is that PHP is pre-installed and ready to use. I can use PHP from the command line all by itself, or in a cronjob, or for debugging my PHP applications, or as part of my local development environment

• VI – poweful command-line text editor

  With VI I can edit text documents, configuration files, and code files without opening an application

• DIFF – file comparison

  I can compare two different files from the command line using diff -r /path/to/file/a /path/to/file/b

These are some of the reasons why Mac OS is a viable desktop choice for IT professionals, especially for LAMP programmers. I’ll discuss several other reasons in part 2 of this article. Please feel free to let me know what you like and/or dislike about Mac OS by leaving your comments.