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Explaining The Windows/UNIX Cultural Divide
giampy writes "Joel Spolsky writes a review-like article on the last book of Eric S. Raymond (The Art of Unix Programming). His views on the cultural differences among Windows and Unix programmers are well explained. Overall, an interesting read." Also on the topic of Windows, badriram writes "Microsoft is reorganizing the windows team, it seems the are separating the
OS core development. Seems like things heading in the right direction in creating a more secure OS, and making it more business oriented. Read the
article here."
Check out Monad, the OO extendable command shell for Longhorn. Quite interesting.
Btw, on 2000 and XP (maybe 9x too), you can assign a shortcut to the command prompt, say Ctrl+Alt+S, so hitting that will get you a command prompt quickly. And enabling autocomplete to and QuickEdit and Insert modes on cmd.exe adds a lot to productivity too.
Go somewhere random
ESR: "Whenever possible, prototype in an interpreted language before coding C."
Hello, Mr Raymond, there are actually quite a number of high-level compiled languages, that will give you most of the convenience of an interpreted language with most of the speed of C. Write your prototype - and then deploy it, because it's already fast and robust enough for everyday use.
For anyone who has ever wondered why more people don't use linux, staroffice, etc, I recommend the classic on technology marketing "Crossing the Chasm" by Geoffrey Moore. It describes the "chasm" which technology companies face in crossing from the early adopter market to the pragmatic, mainstream market.
The consumers on the left side of the chasm - what Moore terms the innovators and early adopters - enjoy using new technology, enjoy putting things together, have the vision to see the potential of new technology, and are willing to put up with inconveniences in the iterim.
The mainstream market is pragmatic. It prefers to bet on clear market leaders (so as to minimise risk and benefit from the supporting ecosystem which inevitably grow around the market leader), is willing to wait and see, and needs complete, fully functional, headache-free solutions for their specific needs. Consumers in the mainstream market rely on references within the mainstream market to drive their buying decisions.
A technology company which wants to transition from the early adopter market to the mainstream market therefore has to bridge this "chasm", and in the process, change the focus of its marketing efforts and adjust its product accordingly. As far as the desktop market is concerned, Unix (with the exception of Mac OS X) is a product which clearly has not bridged the chasm.
Read the article (I know, it will be hard to force yourself to do so if you are a slashdot regular
I don't know if Spolsky didn't read this far, or if he's just a weak plagarist, or maybe this is the only part that made a big enough impression on him to merit rephrasing for his own column.
The only difference I see is POV, and substitute "mac" for "windows".
I don't recall slashes of either variety in VMS file specifications. They used square brackets and dots, like: "DEVICE:[AIDTOPIA.SLASHDOT]COMMENT.TXT;3". I know lots of people hated this syntax, but I found it quite expressive. For one thing, it was easy to distinguish between a directory listing ([FOO]) and the file which stored the directory information (FOO.DIR).
Perhaps they started allowing slashes for POSIX compliance. That was about the time I (sadly) left the VMS world. I recall DEC claims at a DECUS symposium that VMS was the first OS to achieve POSIX compliance, which was quite a feat since it was so non-UNIXy to begin with.
No, seriously? Windows GUIs suck... compared to what?
Compared to X? The same X where every single programmer just _has_ to use a different layout, different shortcuts, different menu structure, and for bonus points his own widgets?
Not to make you sound like a newbie in the world of computing, but what you are railing against isn't the 'ease of use' of UNIX/GNU/Linux GUIs.
Many, many people fall into this trap. What you are proposing is the adoption of something both unessecary (and in many cases) Evil, Bad and Wrong. This thing is called an SAA CUA. They were practically invented by IBM in the 50s and 60s. These ideas are simple: do something one way and only one way.
From the user's perspective, this is okay. I only have to learn quaduple-double-bucky-shift-Q to print once.
From the UI designer's point of view this is crap. Look at video games. Many custom, learn once and use once indterfaces. Games deal with this by being on the cutting edge of computer-assisted education. They have dollars and reputations staked in 'playability' and 'ease of use' so they do the Right Thing.
Wrong Thing: pick standard, crappy global contants, enforce those on everyone. Aribitrary user interfaces are just as bad as random interfaces.
Right Thing: common core behavior in frameworks that act AS EXPECTED, customized application interfaces to the TASK that the application SOLVES or DOES. Show and Walk users through the non-standard parts with HOW-TOs, demos and trainers.
The Right Way is more work for the lazy, boring person who wouldn't write documentation anyway. The Wrong Way means that you probably will guess correctly on the first try, but the application programmer still didn't do his job.
This is a very important sticking point with the Aunt Mable newbie computer user argument as well. If good ol' Auntie has never used a computer, learning a KDE (GNOME) desktop or the UNIX command line will be as EQUALLY challenging as learning a WIMP like Windows. MACs were/are easily learned because of some UI choices that favor new users without bothering experienced users (of those UI's).
Finally, like in the world of video games, with the diversity of UIs in Linux/GNU/Unix I can select those features/interfaces that work best and use them. With a system like Windows, some people won't buy/sell your software unless is meets the criteria in the SAA CUA.
I appologise for the grammar. I need more sleep and less Trolls.
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."