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Explaining The Windows/UNIX Cultural Divide

Posted by timothy on from the it's-a-long-long-way dept.

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."

3 of 673 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It's all about the shell! by bheer · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  2. The usual "C or Perl" thing, then... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Crossing the Chasm by gargle · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.