From a review written by Joel Spolsky of Eric S. Raymond's new book:
I've encountered too many Unix programmers who sneer at Windows programming, thinking that Windows is heathen and stupid. Raymond all too frequently falls into the trap of disparaging the values of other cultures without considering where they came from. It's rather rare to find such bigotry among Windows programmers, who are, on the whole, solution-oriented and non-ideological. At the very least, Windows programmers will concede the faults of their culture and say pragmatically, "Look, if you want to sell a word processor to a lot of people, it has to run on their computers, and if that means we use the Evil Registry instead of elegant ~/.rc files to store our settings, so be it." The very fact that the Unix world is so full of self-righteous cultural superiority, "advocacy," and slashdot-karma-whoring sectarianism while the Windows world is more practical ("yeah, whatever, I just need to make a living here") stems from a culture that feels itself under siege, unable to break out of the server closet and hobbyist market and onto the mainstream desktop.
I would argue that what Joel describes here as Windows pragmatism is really just another form of snobbery. The only difference is that instead of turning up their collective nose at poorly designed software, Windows programmers are turning up their nose at what they perceive to be, in essence, ivory-tower programmers. This can be easily misinterpreted as cool-headed pragmatism, but those noses are still up in the air with disdain, dude.
Posted by Jason at December 16, 2003 09:01 AM