I think most startups I've seen are using some form of POSIX back end. I've been advising corporate techs with only .NET experience to start learning some bash at least.
I moved from commercial .NET coding to startup-land a few years ago, and there's definitely a learning curve. I had to ditch Windows on my personal PC and start using Linux at home to really get the hang of it. YMMV.
Funny to read, because I have the reverse experience. I have for long been using Linux and classic open source tooling for my work and am now moving to use Windows and .NET.
I have immense issues understanding the platform and how everything work. For example, scheduling jobs is something I still don't fully understand.
> The mess of terminal windows and text editors that I code in now is frustrating at times.
Just use emacs for everything! It runs in X, it runs in a TTY, it runs everywhere.
My own stack is st[1], tmux & emacs, with Firefox as my browser, within a tiling window manager. I have a single terminal open at any point in time, with tmux multiplexing the sessions. I use C-z as the tmux escape key, because it's easy to type and doesn't do any harm if I accidentally type it outside of tmux. I autostart emacs in server mode from a systemd unit[2] and run it under X.
Sometimes I use emacs's TTY or shell modes. This is something I'd like to explore more. If I did this, I might be able to have one window for both shells and text editing.
Regardless, I have one terminal window to rule them all and one editor window to rule them all. With Firefox tabs, I only need one web-browser window too (although I'm considering using emacs-w3m and/or eww more).
>Sometimes I use emacs's TTY or shell modes. This is something I'd like to explore more. If I did this, I might be able to have one window for both shells and text editing.
However, I still use the terminal by using ConEMU with Git Bash to get git in the terminal because I don't know how else to do it. But you mention bash and awk, I have never in my years of experience really used these tools a lot either.
Maybe some small bash-script to backup or something similar, but nothing else really. You don't have to use it and most of the times it's easier to write a python script or what not.
I haven't really bothered to learn any PowerShell except "Update-Database" in the Package Manager Console.
DLL Hell could have got a lot better since I last had to deal with it. I occasionally bump into a dependency problem with Ruby gems that reminds me of it.
I don't use bash a lot, but there is an expectation in Linux-land that everyone has some familiarity with it. That's not true in the Windows world so much. In my experience anyway. I'd be interested to see if a much more functional shell environment generates more use of it.
> I think most startups I've seen are using some form of POSIX back end.
Typical hip startups use "tools" (frameworks, libraries, etc.) that abstract underlying platform to such an obscene degree, that it doesn't really matter, if the platform is POSIX-compatible or not.
On the contrary, when these tools invariably break, knowing your way around POSIX environment is indispensable. Something as simple as invoking strace on a binary to find out where this damn thing looks for files it needs can save you hours.
I moved from commercial .NET coding to startup-land a few years ago, and there's definitely a learning curve. I had to ditch Windows on my personal PC and start using Linux at home to really get the hang of it. YMMV.