Coding Horror: Douchebaggery

It's not a strong opinion. He's saying something stupid and stupidly arrogant:

I would have a hard time imagining hiring a programmer who was still on Windows for 37signals. If you don't care enough about your tools to get the best, your burden of proof just got a lot heavier.

Whatever. I could find you some old fogeys who wouldn't hire you because you didn't love OpenVMS, and Richard Stallman himself doomed us all to using Unix instead of VMS, which he prefered, because of political constraints. Is DHH using OpenVMS? No? Then he's not using the best tools, and he should seriously consider firing his stupid ass.

That he thinks that ability really corresponds to making the polically correct choice in OSes really says more about his hangups than his discernment. As for OSX, it frankly strikes me as the Disney Corp. of the OS world. But that's just my stupid opinion, and I wouldn't hit someone over the head with it.

I code on Windows, and deploy to Linux and have never noticed any differences besides file path names and a mysteriously superior performance of MySQL on linux. Hey--I know linux in and out----why am I not using it for a desktop machine? Because Windows is better at that.

So many people, so many opinions. :-) I have to build software for deployment on Windows (stupid day job) but I code it on Linux because Linux desktop is so much better in every respect: starting from fantastic font rendering, superior window management with virtual desktops and configurable hotkeys for everything (critical for laptops). Even windows networking over Samba works MUCH faster than native junk built into XP.

I completely agree with DHH: there must be reasons for people voluntarily crippling themselves. And those reasons are serious enough to not give those people a job.

And no, there aren't any "hidden strengths" of Windows that Atwood is talking about, I've spent all my life on this platform: it was cool in late 90s because it was a fully preemptive multi-tasking OS that ran easily on early Pentiums with 8MB of RAM. It's not so cool now, when there is only one software vendor left who makes anything worth running on it.

Disney might not produce the absolutely biggest roller coasters — nor did they really hit on the "Future World" with EPCOT — but they do a lot of things extremely well.

Disney accommodates its market extremely well, builds massive installations internationally, has an unearthly attention to detail (just look at the lettering on the signs in the Magic Kingdom or the Tree of Life), has strategic ties all over the place, does fantastic feats of engineering, and, oh yeah, consistently pulls in massive profit.

It's had its flops, but it's been in the game forever. You might not like its product, but that probably means you're just not in the target audience and no one is forcing you to buy a ticket.

And even if you're not in the target audience you can still appreciate the value other people get out of it.

(Disclaimer: I'm an OS X user. Before that I used both Windows and Linux for years at a time. I'm still routinely exposed to and do work with all three)