[Gllug] Controversial Joel Spolsky article

[Tethys]

Richard Jones writes:

>http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Biculturalism.html

It's so close to being a good article... and yet it falls down by missing
the point. The Unix philosophy *isn't* to write program for other programmers.
It's to design in a certain way (which happens to be liked by programmers),
but that design philosphoy also has benefits for everyone else too, although
it may be less immediately apparent.

Separating mechanism from policy also predates X by quite some time.

The most interesting thing about it for me, though, was this:

	When Raymond points out that the CSV format is inferior to the
	/etc/passwd format, he's trying to score points for Unix against
	Windows, but, you know what? He's right. /etc/passwd is easier to
	parse than CSV, and if you read this book, you'll know why, and
	you'll be a better programmer.

That's linked to part of the book at:

	http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch05s02.html#id2901882

All well and good, right? Except for the fact that Raymond *didn't*
point it out... *I* did. In an email to him in March this year, while
reviewing an early draft of the book. The two paragraphs before the
"RFC 882 Format" heading are lifted nearly word for word from my email
(as indeed are a few other parts of the book), and yet I appear to be
conspicuously uncredited...

Am I bothered by it? Not really, no. My ego isn't such that I need the
credits, and I made my comments to try and improve the book (which IMHO
I've done). But I find it kind of ironic that the same man once wrote:

	Potential contributors want project leaders with enough
	humility and class to be able to to say, when objectively
	appropriate, ``Yes, that does work better than my version,
	I'll use it'' and to give credit where credit is due.

(http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/homesteading/homesteading/ar01s11.html)

Besides, as Joel says:

	He's right. /etc/passwd is easier to parse than CSV, and if you read
	this book, you'll know why, and you'll be a better programmer.

So in Joel's eyes, I'm a better programmer than ESR, 'coz I was able to
see why /etc/passwd is a better format that CSV, and ESR wasn't :-)

Tet
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