I accidentally deleted this December 23rd entry while deleting comment spam (145 to be exact). To make sure the spammers don’t win:

Joel Spolsky: “There are too many monocultural programmers who, like the typical American kid who never left St. Paul, Minnesota, can’t quite tell the difference between a cultural value and a core human value. I’ve encountered too many Unix programmers who sneer at Windows programming, thinking that Windows is heathen and stupid. […] It’s rather rare to find such bigotry among Windows programmers, who are, on the whole, solution-oriented and non-ideological. At the very least, Windows programmers will concede the faults of their culture and say pragmatically, ‘Look, if you want to sell a word processor to a lot of people, it has to run on their computers, and if that means we use the Evil Registry instead of elegant ~/.rc files to store our settings, so be it.’ The very fact that the Unix world is so full of self-righteous cultural superiority, ‘advocacy,’ and slashdot-karma-whoring sectarianism while the Windows world is more practical (‘yeah, whatever, I just need to make a living here’) stems from a culture that feels itself under siege, unable to break out of the server closet and hobbyist market and onto the mainstream desktop.”

Food for thought. Related reading: The Religion of Technology.