It's really quite stunning the number of Apple notbook computers there are at OSCON. It's a sign of Apple's remarkable hardware design and of the attractiveness of Mac OS X that so many Perl developers are making the switch. And it's not just the Perl developers. A friend of mine who is an active member of the Ant (the Java build tool) developmen team just made the leap (from Windows, no less), and he's pretty excited about it. I swear that over half the notebook computers I've seen people using here are either iBooks or TiBooks, with a smatering of PowerBooks, to boot. From where I'm sitting at the moment, 3 of the 4 computers I can see (excluding my own TiBook!) are Macs.
This can only be good for the Mac platform. As someone who recently returned to the Mac OS fold (after a few years of Windows and then a few years of Linux), I'm thrilled to see how attractive the combination of the Mac UI and the Unix guts is to Unix-oriented developers. I love that things, as Ziggy says, just work, and I love that I can get all the Unix power tools I need running, and that I am able to run all of this great software on the slickest hardware to be found.
I firmly believe that things are looking very very good in the Mac OS X/Unix software market, and it's because all of the geeks (all of the alpha geeks Tim O'Rielly might say) are coming to the platform, and contributing great new software that will only make it better. And I'm going to thoroughly enjoy the ride
