There has been a lot of well deserved attention going the way of "Mac OS X Tiger". A the current time, a lot of this attention tends to focus on the consumer constituency comprised of Aunt Milly et al, designers, and new media aficionados. The
Daring Fireball posts an article titled:
Point, Counterpoint: Mac OS X Is Great for Fortysomething Unix Hackers . This particular post applies to OpenLink Software in general across a myriad of fronts, especially the essence of this excerpt:
On the surface, Grahamâs piece seems like a nice pat on the back to the Mac platform. But thereâs an implication in his piece that the worldâs most prodigiously talented programmers are only now switching (or switching back) to the Mac, when in fact some of them have been here all along. GUI programming is hard, and for GUI programmers, the Mac has always been, in Brent Simmonsâs words, âThe Showâ.
I.e. the idea that by the mid-â90s the Mac user base had been whittled down to âgraphic designers and grandmasâ is demonstrably false â someone must have been writing the software the designers and grandmas were using, no? â but I donât think itâs worth pressing the point, because I suspect it wasnât really what Graham meant to imply. And the main thrust of his point is true: there is a certain class of hackers â your prototypical Unix nerds â who not only werenât using Macs a decade ago, but whose antipathy toward Macs was downright hostile. And it is remarkable that these hackers are now among Mac OS Xâs strongest adherents.
Itâs another sign of Mac OS Xâs dual nature: from the perspective of your typical user (and particularly long-time Mac users), it is the Mac OS with a modern Unix architecture encapsulated under the hood; from the perspective of the hackers Graham writes of, it is Unix with a vastly superior GUI.
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