[Gllug] Controversial Joel Spolsky article

[Bernard Peek]

In message <20031220172217.GA12987 at phaistos.bruce>, Bruce Richardson 
<itsbruce at uklinux.net> writes


>For the most part, the PC industry grew up in isolation from what had
>gone before.  The lessons that had been learned on mainframes and
>minicomputers weren't passed on to the microcomputer people, partly
>because those working on the former had no interest in microcomputers
>(or held them in contempt).  This means that a whole new industry grew
>up largely in ignorance and with no correctives to its bad practices.
>By the time microcomputers became complex enough to run decent operating
>systems, these poor practices had effectively become industry standards.

In part the PC industry was created specifically to avoid some of the 
practises that were common in the mainframe and minicomputer world. 
Departments bought PCs without telling the central IT department. That 
was only possible because PCs didn't need a sysadmin. The story of the 
PC is a struggle to escape from control by central IT. Now of course 
Microsoft is trying to move everything back by running applications on 
huge central server farms.

>
>Many of the poor practices and design decisions of companies like
>Microsoft - binary configuration files,

There are some exceptions but most Windows programs used editable text 
configuration files until relatively recently. The decision to move away 
from text configuration files is a fairly recent innovation. It's a 
deliberate decision, not an accident. Given that most Windows users 
shouldn't try to manually edit configuration files I don't see much 
wrong with it.

> poor modularity etc - are part
>due to this small-computer, cottage-industry heritage.  But it also
>means there's a whole self-contained IT society which operates in
>unknowing ignorance, lacking the breadth of knowledge to recognise these
>faults.
>
>Most Linux admins started from within this blinkered society but had the
>curiousity to look beyond its limits.  They discovered and embraced the
>good practices and disciplines that the Unix world offered.  Otoh, all
>too many Windows admins are unjustifiably complacent and unaware,
>ignorant even of the limited capabilities of the opaque OS they rely on.
>It can be very depressing to have to work alongside such people and it
>is difficult to overstate their lack of curiosity and ignorance of basic
>computing principles and mechanisms.

That's another aspect of what Joel was talking about. Windows systems 
are optimised to work without the need for a sysadmin. Linux on the 
desktop is moving in that direction.

>  As a rule, such people are
>actively suspicious of automation and the many productivity-enhancements
>that a skilled admin can make to computer systems.  They will choose the
>interactive, drag-and-drop solution over the automated solution because
>they trust what they can see (even though what they see is just an
>animated representation of an action).

It's called abstraction. One of the main aims of modern software 
development is to hide all of the gory details.



-- 
Bernard Peek
London, UK. DBA, Manager, Trainer & Author. Will work for money.

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