* Bill Atkins (Mar 31, 2005 11:30):
Paul Graham says a lot of things; his opinion about what "the best
hackers" use isn't really a solid reason for me to consider shelling
out a few thousand dollars for what, to me, is not an ideal system.
Good point. However, what I think Paul is mainly talking about are
the Apple laptops, not necessarily Macintoshes in general. When it
comes to choosing a laptop, your basically bound to whatever is
available, as there is no easy way of building one yourself. Then, as
the market is today, you have a choice. You choose to go with something
that is either covered with Intel(R) Inside(TM) and a Microsoft(R)
Windows(TM) Pre-installed stickers or a big outline of an apple.
I think DHH simply phrased his blog-entry a bit slopily, or perhaps
didn't actually manage to say what he was intending to say, that about
choosing your tools well. Let's face it, discussing platforms is so
passe. Hell, Paul Graham has said so repeatedly [1], reasoning that in
the future the only platform will be the Web and it won't matter what
hardware you're using or what operating system you've installed on it.
Listen, what really matters isn't fading menus, zooming windows,
sparkling icons. What really matters, and this is the point DHH was
trying to make, are the tools that use, are contained in, and
are activated by clicking on them. I, for example, am ten times as
productive now as I ever was when I was using Windows. When I was using
Windows, I never found a set of tools that suited my style of work.
When I discovered Linux, I found screen, vim, mutt, and zsh, which all
fit my needs very well. I was still bound to a crappy windowing
environment, but I learned to live with it and later improved it with
tools like ratpoison and a 256-color xterm.
DHH seems to like Mac OS X and the tools that it provides him with. Who
can argue with that? I am really happy with the tools that I have found
over the years using Linux. Who can argue with that? Still, the reason
I was able to do that was that I was allowed to experiment with
different operating systems and different sets of tools. No one decried
that I must use any given system with any given set. I hope that no one
else will be forced into using something that they don't want to use.
Mankind has one inherent freedom: to choose to live the way they want,
doing what they want, and with whoever they wish to do it with. All the
other freedoms that we bestow upon ourselves follow [2].
Please remember that before you tell someone else what to do or what to
think,
nikolai
P.S.
The arguments made in this post aren't directed at anyone in particular;
let's not become haters.
D.S.
[1] Yet he starts blabbing about Mac OS X being 1337, which is kind of
strange.
[2] Well, most people have freedom of speech, for example. Some,
though, aren't allowed to express their love for another human
being the way they want to do it. That's terrible.
