I guess you may have a point. The recent spate of postings regarding the HealthCare.gov website, which contain numerous comments about the front-end website and proceed to conflate that with development of the entire system lead me to believe a solid percentage of HNers live in a "all development is web development" bubble.
Really until I moved to the Valley I had never really seen people I'd consider "hackers" or "programmers" writing code on anything other than a linux or unix terminal, or in Visual Studio, Eclipse, or some other IDE on Windows. I was actually shocked to see Apple products be so ubiquitous in programmer circles.
Outside of the "web development is all development" monoculture parts of the Valley there is a wide world of software development and developer communities who would basically laugh at the notion that Mac is an "ideal development platform" (some would guffaw at the notion that it's even an adequate one) for anything other than the Apple App Store ecosystem (where it isn't really ideal so much as mandatory, if one wishes to not break laws).
I'd make this conjecture: the vast majority of software development, in the Valley or otherwise, isn't done on Macs; it's really a very small subset of developers who prefer it, and that subset consists mainly of web app and iOS mobile app developers. If the majority of HNers develop software on Apple products, all that means is that HN's primary developer demographic is a tiny subset of the overall industry.
Yep. I didn't mean to imply that all webapp development was done on Apple platforms, either. In fact, what I really meant, but worded poorly, was that it's really a very specific subset of the developer "community" that: a) thinks "all development is web development" and b) "web development" is ideal when done on Apple platforms.
My experience mirrors what you have explicitly stated--most development, web app or otherwise, isn't done on Apple products.
Really until I moved to the Valley I had never really seen people I'd consider "hackers" or "programmers" writing code on anything other than a linux or unix terminal, or in Visual Studio, Eclipse, or some other IDE on Windows. I was actually shocked to see Apple products be so ubiquitous in programmer circles.
Outside of the "web development is all development" monoculture parts of the Valley there is a wide world of software development and developer communities who would basically laugh at the notion that Mac is an "ideal development platform" (some would guffaw at the notion that it's even an adequate one) for anything other than the Apple App Store ecosystem (where it isn't really ideal so much as mandatory, if one wishes to not break laws).
I'd make this conjecture: the vast majority of software development, in the Valley or otherwise, isn't done on Macs; it's really a very small subset of developers who prefer it, and that subset consists mainly of web app and iOS mobile app developers. If the majority of HNers develop software on Apple products, all that means is that HN's primary developer demographic is a tiny subset of the overall industry.