Culture of UNIX and Windows Programmers

OSNews links to Joel Spolsky’s The Cultural Differences of UNIX and Windows on the JoelOnSoftware web site. Joel has a whole series of thoughtful essays on his site. I think there are some good points in the essay, although any argument that claims that all things can be divided into two categories tends to be a bit extreme to demonstrate the black-and-white divide:

This directly led to a schism in user interfaces; nobody has ever quite been able to agree on all the details of how the desktop UI should work, and they think this is OK, because their culture values this diversity, but for Aunt Marge it is very much not OK to have to use a different UI to cut and paste in one program than she uses in another.

Needless to say, Slashdot picked up on this essay and has the predictable discussion here and here.

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