Thanks Was: RFC: Educating the majority

On Jan 13, 2004, at 9:27 AM, Craig White wrote:

> On Tue, 2004-01-13 at 09:08, Chris Gehlker wrote:
>> On Jan 13, 2004, at 7:40 AM, Bill Lindley wrote:
>>
>>> I'm reading Eric Raymond's "Art of Unix Programming" now, it
>>> definitely shows the technical reasons why the Unix Way is better...
>>> and those *do* come out at the user end of things.
>>
>> ESR is certainly a very smart, interesting and thought provoking guy
>> but he is also very often wrong. Take what he says with a grain of
>> salt.
> ---
> Are you content to just shoot from the hip here or did you care to give
> meaning to this by illustration?

I certainly don't intend to be cryptic. It's just that so many have
reviewed Mr. Raymond's prognostications in general and "The Art of Unix
Programming" in particular that that I have little to add. I'm sure a
little googling will provide all the illustration that anyone could
want.

I will give a few examples off the top of my head:

The obvious one is that he made very public predictions that MS would
be bankrupt by now. He had a nice argument built on the premise that
consumer level computers would break through the $1000 barrier, that
therefore Windows would become too significant a part of the total cost
of the computer, that one computer retailer would move to Linux, that
the cost advantage would force the rest of the industry to follow suit.

Well the price of consumer PCs did fall below $1000, Lindows did go on
sale at Wal-Mart, but it has yet to drive Dell and HP to the wall.

Another illustration is that at one point in the book he seems to
realize that the general lack in *nix of some single standard for
program automation corresponding to COM and it's descendants is a real
problem. There are several competing technologies from bonobo to that
KDE thingee to XML/RPC and the result is that end user programs on *nix
aren't written to support automation the way that programs on Windows
are. So Raymond seems to 'get it' there but he doesn't draw the obvious
conclusion that until Unix in general has a substitute for Visual Basic
it will not receive serious consideration from some businesses. In
fact, it needs a VB Clone to be at all workable for many businesses.

I do want to salute ESR for making predictions that are actually
falsifiable. He can be insightful even when he's wrong. Yet I agree
with his critics who point out that his preference for Unix seems at
least partly to be based on ignorance of the alternatives.

Anybody who wants arguments for why Unix is better from folks who
really seem to understand Windows and appreciate its strengths is
referred to Thomas and Hunt.