Came here to say what pretty much everyone else is saying. If you're hiring for top talent the market is sparse. It's competitive and you'll need to pay top dollar AND have a good corporate culture AND have an engaging workplace AND have interesting work to do (fortunately I think the last one is pretty easy...) It's depressing sifting through hundreds of candidates who are all either pure paper tigers or are self-taught but haven't spent any time trying to learn the actual fundamentals of good programming. I can knock some shit code together to do simple to moderate tasks but that doesn't make me a programmer / developer / software engineer.

PowerShell is nice and is part of your OS already if you have Windows. You can use .NET and build some pretty structured functions in the long run but start with super simple stuff. Its a really nice bridge from knowing nothing to c# if you're OK tying yourself to the MS stack.

You need more upvoats, because this is it, baby.

RRC, regardless of your project management cycle, is one of those nasty things where everyone (developers, customers, middlemen) throw up their hands and whine but the code is so BAD!. Then, they give the most money to the shop releasing the fastest. In the (quite large) market segment my company plays in the consistent winners year over year aren't the writers of quality code at all, they're the releasers of new features. The same customers that scream about being beta testers this quarter will be bragging about the sweet new features their product has next quarter, while the "quality first" guys haven't even finished a release cycle yet.

Do I agree with this? I'm a technologist with a business degree, so maybe I'm just part of the problem, but whether I, you, or anyone else "agrees" with the philosophy of rapid release (vs longer, higher-quality, better-tested and stable release) -- RRC is what pays the bills.

I'm in the same boat and have had to manually create my X server config on every distro I've tried. Apparently putting a 980 GTX into one 2k monitor and one 1080p monitor is just un-understandable once the install process is complete.

Linux is neat, but as you point out, not many users are willing to put up with the frustration of hand-crafting a config file in a text editor on a fullscreen terminal when all of the other mainstream competition has solved this problem.

What's weird is it's not like the author of the software is posting beliefs you disagree with -- it's literally the twitter account of Notepad++ telling you to uninstall it if you feel a certain way...

I've never been a Notepad++ user anyway, but I guess they don't want me to start :P

Sounds like you opted for door number 2. Good for you.

I also use Sublime Text and it's quite good. I like focus mode.

.NET is a library of common functions Microsoft has built across a few languages. It abstracts a lot of lower-level programming functions at the expense of control, memory management, etc. It's pretty nice if you want to "harness the power of code" without becoming a computer scientist, but if you're looking to write something that's extremely efficient (particularly embedded stuff) it's not so great.

The nice thing about .NET languages is that Visual Studio is an awesome IDE and it supports all of them natively (though it also supports a lot of other languages either natively or through plugins) and the community edition is free.

Also, second vote for sublime text. I use Sublime Text 2 which I happily paid the $70 for, for editing large powershell scripts and for C/C++. I'm not a dev though, so needs may vary.