Programmer friends from UP used to bust my chops for using sissy Lotus Domino, or sissy SQL Server, or sissy Visual Basic to build my apps. Real programmers, I’ve been told, use Unix tools like emacs or better yet, compile from the command line and run things through a shell script. Properly whipped, I did give Unix a chance. I even got to enjoy it for a while, even when ABSi had an NT farm (all thanks to MKS toolkit). For a few shining moments, I was a Unix-geek. But you know what? Underneath all the platform bigotry, it’s just another implemenation, just another language game of the same base Turing architecture. I had maintained since then that the Unix-Windows divergence was largely a difference in rhetoric.
Joel Spolsky writes a nifty essay on Platform Biculturalism. I enjoy forwarding this to the buds who tormented me. The point: It’s all the same now. At the filesystem and protocol level where things work, the differences are trivial:
What’s left is cultural differences. Yes, we all eat food, but over there, they eat raw fish with rice using wood sticks, while over here, we eat slabs of ground cow on bread with our hands. A cultural difference doesn’t mean that American stomachs can’t digest sushi or that Japanese stomachs can’t digest Big Macs, and it doesn’t mean that there aren’t lots of Americans who eat sushi or Japanese who eat burgers, but it does mean that Americans getting off the plane for the first time in Tokyo are confronted with an overwhelming feeling that this place is strange, dammit, and no amount of philosophizing about how underneath we’re all the same, we all love and work and sing and die will overcome the fact that Americans and Japanese can never really get comfortable with each others’ toilet arrangements.
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So you get these religious arguments. Unix is better because you can debug into libraries. Windows is better because Aunt Madge gets some confirmation that her email was actually sent. Actually, one is not better than another, they simply have different values: in Unix making things better for other programmers is a core value and in Windows making things better for Aunt Madge is a core value.
I think the same goes for other schisms: PC vs. Mac, East Coast vs. West Coast rap, Ateneo vs. LaSalle, Noranians vs. Vilmanians.
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