One of the biggest architectural events going down in my (new) neck of the woods is the construction of the new Cooper River Bridge to replace the existing (beautiful but ancient) Grace Memorial Bridge (built 1929) and the newer Pearman Bridge (built 1968).
The often enlightening Joel urps up this bit of oversimplified dreck about the differences in Unix and Windows programming culture. Your fearless narrator takes issue with many passages, to wit:
Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers.
This is the central thesis of Joel’s piece (whether or not it is the opinion of Eric S. Raymond–whose book Joel is reviewing in this post–isn’t entierly clear. It is a statement meant to be provocative, of course. And I’m sure there is a kernel of truth in it. But only a kernel. And even if it were true in the early days of Unix (during which time, Joel (Raymond?) rightly observes, there were no end users to speak of besides other programmers), it certainly isn’t true today, when every Linux distro is fighting every other to capture some of that lucrative desktop market share (and when the availible Linux desktop environments are keeping step with Windows).
Oy vey, I thought, he’s actually teaching young programmers to write more impossible man pages.
I remember my early days of using Solaris and being mystified by man pages. I do a lot of software training for end users. So I’m very big on good documentation with lots of screen shots and step-by-step examples. But media-rich documentation does not eclipse the value of man pages, which aren’t designed for end users anyway. Man pages are crib notes for power users–a quick way of refreshing your memory about what that -F option does on ls.
OS X is the proof: Apple finally created Unix for Aunt Marge, but only because the engineers and managers at Apple were firmly of the end-user culture (which I’ve been imperialistically calling “the Windows Culture” even though historically it originated at Apple).
Actually, it originated with
Xerox. The idea that Apple invented GUIs out of whole cloth is just marketing spin.
It’s rather rare to find such [Unix-style] bigotry among Windows programmers, who are, on the whole, solution-oriented and non-ideological.
I don’t have any extensive commentary on the above line except to say that my jaw dropped when I read it. I’ve certainly met my share of Linux snobs, but I’ve also met my share of Windows
shills. How one can make such blanket statements and expect to be taken seriously is beyond me.
I use Windows and Linux and I like both. Prior to Windows 2000, the Windows OS (which Joel tells us is crafted with end users lovingly in mind) was an unstable, amaturish kluge. It held sway only due to the strong-arm, anti-competitive business practices of its parent company. But, with the release of 2000 and XP, the boys in Redmond finally got something right.
But the fact that, after years of user neglect, Microsoft saw fit to ship a good OS doesn’t mean that Linux is a non-issue. Over the years, it has become an increasingly viable choice on servers and on the desktop. And I think that’s a trend that will continue. Is desktop linux still a bit hobbyist? Sure it is. But it has come a long way and doesn’t show any signs of stopping. Whether Linux desktop environments can ever tump the Windows GUI is still an open question. But we’ll all have to wait and see. And, at least in the open source world, we have the option of participating as well.
Some good discussion of the piece.