In an otherwise excellent-as-usual article on craftsmanship, Joel indulges in a bit of unix-weenie bashing:
And of course, a certain type of programmer will argue that my new child-process architecture is inferior to the original. It’s “bloated” (because of all the extra lines of code). It has more potential for bugs, because of all the extra lines of code. It’s overkill. It’s somehow emblematic of why Windows is an inferior operating system, they will say. What’s all this about progress indicators? they sneer. Just hit Ctrl+Z and then “ls -l” repeatedly and watch to see if the file size is growing!
I’m sure there is a ‘certain type of programmer’ that would say such things about an end-user GUI program. They’re idiots, and they ‘program’ on all platforms. I guess there’s also a certain type of software pundit that finds imaginary strawman counter-arguments a good way to make their arguments more persuasive.
Posted by Bill Stilwell at December 1, 2003 07:16 PM