Joel Spolsky is dead wrong for once

“Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers.” Uh, Joel, what about Amazon.com and Google? Linux core, custom applications. Possibly the most useful and broadly usable computer programs out there.
Joel Spolsky is usually insightful, smart, and lucid. His most recent essay, critiquing a book by Eric Raymond on The Art of Unix Programming, is dead wrong and confused.
To be fair, Spolsky is writing about Eric Raymond, who epitomizes the ubergeek arrogance of a class of unix infrastructure hackers. But Spolsky attributes this attitude to all Unix-platform developers, leaving out the user experience brilliance at Amazon, Google, and many other elegant and popular web-based applications.
Spolsky’s essay equates Unix infrastructure development with Windows end-user applications. Apples and oranges.

2 thoughts on “Joel Spolsky is dead wrong for once”

  1. Sorry, but Amazon, Google et al are *not* UNIX applications. They’re web applications.
    Sure, they may be UNIX on the backend, but they probably work completely differently on the backend too. What you’re describing are web applications tailored to best-practice web application culture values.
    The web as an application platform is not Windows or UNIX. That’s why it looks the same on both OSes.
    Spolsky may be succumbing to a stereotype of UNIX culture but it’s the same stereotype that the book describes, and it’s a book review.

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