why Unix?

[Jason House]

Jussi Jumppanen wrote:

> Jason House Wrote:
> 
>> For example, as an emacs user, I can easilly program for an hour
>> without touching my mouse.
> 
> I would say 'not using the mouse' is clear sign the programmer is
> coding using a programmer's editor and not a modern day IDE.

That's true, but that really wasn't the point...  I was more trying to make 
a point about how different some things can be.

> I would also say many Windows programmers are completely lost
> without their IDE, and this can makes them less productive as a
> developer.

As Andrei said, it's likely to take a lot of use to get back to prior 
productivity levels... It takes a lot of work to shift to unix and be 
comfortable. I'm not really sure what makes Andrei think unix is so much 
better for productivity :)  Maybe it's something along the lines of learning 
a new programming language in order to expand your programming skill set...

> They could make themselves better programmers by overcoming their
> addiction to the IDE.
> 
>   http://www.charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.html
> 
> But programming on Windows without a mouse driven, language specific
> IDE, using nothing but the command line and a good editor is possible
> and really quite easy to do.
> 
>> As a commandline utility, it can be combined with other stuff such
>> as ls, sort, grep, sed, awk, etc... I don't know if I'd start there
>> though...
> 
> Replace ls with dir, download the Win32 version of grep, sed, awk
> and you can run all those tools just fine from the Windows command
> line, or from within any decent editor.
> 
> You don't have to go to Unix to find the command line.

When on windows, that's exactly what I do.  After having used them enough, I 
can't live without them.  It's a real shame that my current job tries to 
provide a unified framework and completely destroyed all utility of the 
command line.  I'm not allowed to download cygwin.  ugh...