Performance Computing – Features – The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
Nowhere is this word/image culture tension better represented than in the contrast between UNIX and NT. When the much-vaunted UNIX-killer arrived a few years ago, backed by the full faith and credit of the Redmond juggernaut, I approached it with an open mind. But NT left me cold. There was something deeply unsatisfying about it. I had that ineffable feeling (apologies to Gertrude Stein) there was no there there. Granted, I already knew the major themes of system and network administration from my UNIX days, and I will admit that registry hacking did vex me for a few days, but after my short scramble up the learning curve I looked back at UNIX with the feeling I’d been demoted from a backhoe to a leaf-blower. NT just didn’t offer room to move. The one-size-fits-all, point-and-click, we’ve-already-anticipated-all-your-needs world of NT had me yearning for those obscure command-line flags and man -k. I wanted to craft my own solutions from my own toolbox, not have my ideas slammed into the visually homogenous, prepackaged, Soviet world of Microsoft Foundation Classes.
Lots of great images and ideas here, some of which I have felt but never articulated. The “short learning curve” is a great summary of my brief-but-still-too-long experience with Windows 2000. It was boring: you couldn’t do anything.
Mastery of UNIX, like mastery of language, offers real freedom. The price of freedom is always dear, but there’s no substitute. Personally, I’d rather pay for my freedom than live in a bitmapped, pop-up-happy dungeon like NT. I’m hoping that as IT folks become more seasoned and less impressed by superficial convenience at the expense of real freedom, they will yearn for the kind of freedom and responsibility UNIX allows. When they do, UNIX will be there to fill the need.
There’s approximately zero chance of this happening in my workplace, but then, I look at it as self-imposed exile. I’m not willing to force someone to expand their horizons, enlarge their mind. They have to want it for themselves.