The Java virtual machine greatly simplified cross-OS portability. C was born in the early 1970s as a way to make Unix portable across different hardware platforms.

And, even if you deploy your application locally, virtual machines (VMs) make it easy to set up whichever type of OS environment you need.Ĭross-platform portability is an explicit goal for most popular programming languages today, such as C, Java and Python. We deploy most apps in the cloud now, where you can choose to host them on whichever developer operating system you want - well, maybe not on MacOS, but certainly Windows or Linux. If you compare traditional OSes, the differences shouldn't be that significant for developers. But there is one big exception, though, and that's mobile development.

So, should programmers still specialize in one OS or another? Or does the developer operating system no longer matter much from a programmer's standpoint? The short answer is that, by and large, it won't matter which OS developers use.

Android studio linux vs windows