Understanding the Windows/UNIX cultural divide

Joel Spolsky's review of The Art of Unix Programming, the new book by Eric S. Raymond, offers an interesting take on the cultural differences between UNIX and Windows coders:

Suppose you take a Unix programmer and a Windows programmer and give them each the task of creating the same end-user application. The Unix programmer will create a command-line or text-driven core and occasionally, as an afterthought, build a GUI which drives that core. This way the main operations of the application will be available to other programmers who can invoke the program on the command line and read the results as text. The Windows programmer will tend to start with a GUI, and occasionally, as an afterthought, add a scripting language which can automate the operation of the GUI interface. This is appropriate for a culture in which 99.999 percent of the users are not programmers in any way, shape, or form, and have no interest in being one.

2003/12/17 · 0 COMMENTS · Link