Once again I was beaten to the punch. I had been rambling and boring the hell out of my co-workers on this same subject about two weeks ago. But it looks like someone had already written a whole book on the subject and Joel beat me with the summary. However, this excellent piece points out that there are two radically different cultures between the UNIX (and I’ll even say Open-Source) developers and Windows developers in so far that they are solving two different problems. Finally a voice of reason in the Unix/Linux Rules, Windows Sucks shouting match. Read it here.
[Listening to: Johnny Too Bad – The Slickers – The Harder the Come (03:05)]
3 responses to “Great Nerd Article”
Nice find. I’ve stacked up many observations over the years, having made a living as both a unix and windows programmer. Now I am making a living as an OS X programmer, and I must admit it seems like a nice compromise. I can be as unixy as I like, but there is also a single, authoritative framework for writing applications for users. As with all such frameworks I have encountered it looks like learning it involves pain and compromise.
But once there, like in Windows, I can rely on the fact that all the other user applications will be using the same framework. So as a programming, I’m smiling. I haven’t graduated to user yet, but from what I’ve seen I might be willing to give it a try.
Noooooooooo! Don’t tempt me into the dark side of using a Mac!!!!! Actually, I’ve been wanting to play around with one just to get a feel for it’s dual role (geeks vs. everyone else) abilities.
I don’t know, the more I do Windows programming the more I like being part of the “everyone else” clan. I’ve done my fair share of Linux stuff and every time I get sucked back into it I find myself cursing the lack of documentation and obviously “geeky” configurations. Maybe in my old age I’m becoming a programming snob, expecting a certain level of usability, preconfiguration and intelligence when it comes to dev environments and API’s. Oh well….maybe Mac has that too, I’ll probably never find out though.