After an initial bout with Visual Source Safe some fifteen years ago, I've only been using sensible source control (i.e, git[1]) for a couple of years now. Yup, apparently the BI world really is pretty different than app dev mainstream... But also apparently closing in on it. Coincidentally (or perhaps not so), this is also about the amount of time I've been using Macs[2]; that'll be three years in September. (I was offered the choice when I started here, and took the Mac precisely because I'd never used one for real, thought it was finally time to find out; haven't regretted it for a second.)
The team was 100% Mac for a week more, when member #4 joined. She used Windows, and was the one initially responsible for setting up our git environment. Poor girl struggled like Hell with that, and when she left us in the Spring of '15 I got to step into her shoes as team source control coordinator; and yes, they felt like size 38[3] high-heel pumps to begin with... Since then, the team has grown from five to... I think it's thirteen at the moment, thereabouts. Most of us use Macs; one guy who has since transferred out to another unit was on Windows, another recently switched to a Mac. Perhaps one or two of our Business Analysts (=PowerPoint Warriors, as I understand it) are on Windows, but that doesn't matter here because they don't much use source control, since they don't code. Our latest addition, though, does, because he is supposed to take over maintenance of our "old stack" (=PDI[4]) jobs from me if all goes well (of which I still have some hope, but also my (ever-increasing) doubts).
So in the last couple years I've been teaching our tools and processes to, uh... five to seven people, depending on how you count -- two just git, five PDI + git -- with the last of these ongoing for two weeks now (though the first week was 40 % short, since I took the Friday after Ascension off). Ooooh Kay... Long setup, finally arrived at the start of the actual story (=anecdotal "evidence"):
Of these seven pupils, three (including the current one) were on Windows at the time, four on Macs. And to the best of my recollection, all the Windows users have struggled more with grasping version control, both conceptually and practically, than the Mac users. Ironically -- at least if you're an old fart from the time when Windows was built on DOS, and Macs didn't have a command line -- this seems to correlate pretty much exactly to Mac users being more comfortable with the command line, and Windows users nowadays being more the point-and-click-only type.
Oh yeah, one final thing: PDI is of course very much not a compiled language, but I can't see what that's got to do with anything. It has dependencies and shit too.
[1]: And (ex) Stash / (now) BitBucket.
[2]: Plural, because I'm on my second one -- dropped the first off my lap while couch-surfing the 'Net (just like now...), cracked the screen. Had to work only on the external screen for a couple months, while this one was squeezed through the delivery bottleneck.
[3]: ~7 in weird Anglophone units? 6?
[4]: Pentaho Data Integration
The team was 100% Mac for a week more, when member #4 joined. She used Windows, and was the one initially responsible for setting up our git environment. Poor girl struggled like Hell with that, and when she left us in the Spring of '15 I got to step into her shoes as team source control coordinator; and yes, they felt like size 38[3] high-heel pumps to begin with... Since then, the team has grown from five to... I think it's thirteen at the moment, thereabouts. Most of us use Macs; one guy who has since transferred out to another unit was on Windows, another recently switched to a Mac. Perhaps one or two of our Business Analysts (=PowerPoint Warriors, as I understand it) are on Windows, but that doesn't matter here because they don't much use source control, since they don't code. Our latest addition, though, does, because he is supposed to take over maintenance of our "old stack" (=PDI[4]) jobs from me if all goes well (of which I still have some hope, but also my (ever-increasing) doubts).
So in the last couple years I've been teaching our tools and processes to, uh... five to seven people, depending on how you count -- two just git, five PDI + git -- with the last of these ongoing for two weeks now (though the first week was 40 % short, since I took the Friday after Ascension off). Ooooh Kay... Long setup, finally arrived at the start of the actual story (=anecdotal "evidence"):
Of these seven pupils, three (including the current one) were on Windows at the time, four on Macs. And to the best of my recollection, all the Windows users have struggled more with grasping version control, both conceptually and practically, than the Mac users. Ironically -- at least if you're an old fart from the time when Windows was built on DOS, and Macs didn't have a command line -- this seems to correlate pretty much exactly to Mac users being more comfortable with the command line, and Windows users nowadays being more the point-and-click-only type.
Oh yeah, one final thing: PDI is of course very much not a compiled language, but I can't see what that's got to do with anything. It has dependencies and shit too.
[1]: And (ex) Stash / (now) BitBucket.
[2]: Plural, because I'm on my second one -- dropped the first off my lap while couch-surfing the 'Net (just like now...), cracked the screen. Had to work only on the external screen for a couple months, while this one was squeezed through the delivery bottleneck.
[3]: ~7 in weird Anglophone units? 6?
[4]: Pentaho Data Integration