Extreme Enthusiasm

Summary: nice post on _why’s blog

Divertente come sempre, _why prende in giro un pomposo accademico che critica Ruby e la sua guida. Mi è particolarmente piaciuto questo commento di “forrest”:

Furthermore, anybody who compares the Poignant Guide to the Head First guides has failed to understand the Poignant Guide altogether. There’s no false jocosity or spoonful of sugar bullcrap to the Poignant Guide. It’s like the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili—it’s a legitimate work of art and literature as well as a programming manual. (It doesn’t talk about how cool Ruby is, really. Does it?)

Man, I don’t know why that kind of response bugs me so much. Maybe it’s because I’ve read a lot of programming lore from the 70s and 80s, when there were a lot more weirdo geek-hippies striding the plains with their 41CXs and Emerson, Lake & Palmer records, playing Dungeons & Dragons and writing arcane articles for the Whole Earth guide when they weren’t cranking out the code.

Sarà che gli ELP e D&D sono due cose che ho molto amato…

Questo articolo “Review: Mac OS X Shines In Comparison With Windows Vista” spiega bene una cosa che mi ha sempre dato molto fastidio di Windows.

Mac OS X, it’s the classic English butler. This OS is designed to make the times you have to interact with it as quick and efficient as possible. It expects that things will work correctly and therefore sees no reason to bother you with correct operation confirmations. If you plug in a mouse, there aren’t going to be any messages to tell you “that mouse you plugged in is now working.” It’s assumed you’ll know that because you’ll be able to instantly use the mouse. Plug in a USB or FireWire hard drive and the disk showing up on your desktop is all the information you need to see that the drive has correctly mounted. It is normally only when things are not working right that you see messages from Mac OS X.

Windows is … well, Windows is very eager to tell you what’s going on. Constantly. Plug something in and you get a message. Unplug something and you get a message. If you’re on a network that’s having problems staying up, you’ll get tons of messages telling you this. It’s rather like dealing with an overexcited Boy Scout … who has a lifetime supply of chocolate-covered espresso beans. This gets particularly bad when you factor in things like the user-level implementation of Microsoft’s new security features.

To put it simply, you can work on a Mac for hours, days even, and only minimally need to directly use the OS. With Vista? The OS demands your attention, constantly.

E’ un’istanza di un tema generale: Windows tratta i suoi utenti come sudditi. “Tieni questi aggiornamenti, e sarà meglio che li installi subito!” Sono così contento di non doverlo usare quasi mai.