the corner office

Joel Spolsky posted a good review of the Art of Unix Programming where he talks about the cultural differences between Unix and Windows developers. To cut a long but interesting discussion short, he makes the points that Unix programmers write code for other programmers, while Windows programmers write for non-programmers, and that the Unix crowd tend to be snooty buggers while Windows developers are more pragmatic and chilled out.

I'm not sure if I entirely agree with all of his comments, because frankly, many many Windows developers build terribly ugly user interfaces. They use the tools at hand but certainly have no insight or commitment to the end-user. Then again, perhaps command line interfaces are inherently so horrid (to Joe User), that the Windows folks deserve a bit of slack after all.

Either way, I downloaded and read the first few chapters of the book a while back and quite enjoyed it. Many of the concepts have manifested themselves in Linux and open-source literature for quite some time, and I know that many of the principles have affected how I approach development in Notes, even. This is definitely going to become my bedtime reading (if you count reading until you fall asleep at your desk as 'bedtime reading'). I do have reservations about putting money in Eric S Raymond's pocket because I plain don't like him, but I think this book might also be one to get in hardcopy.