(2003-12-19) Spolsky Raymond Unix Culture

Joel Spolsky on Eric Raymond's book on UNIX programming culture. What are the cultural differences between Unix and Windows programmers? There are many details and subtleties, but for the most part it comes down to one thing: Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers.... Let's look at a small example. The Unix programming culture holds in high esteem programs which can be called from the Command Line, which take arguments that control every aspect of their behavior, and the output of which can be captured as regularly-formatted, machine readable PlainText.