Coding Horror: Douchebaggery

I can't figure this post out. It reads kind of like a drunken fratboy's impression of Stephen Colbert's impression of DHH. I mean,<p>"...when you're using Rails and OS X, you're using the platform of choice for douchebags."<p>Is that <i>meant</i> to hurt my feelings? Or is it an attempted parody that has gone horribly wrong and started killing innocent bystanders?<p>FWIW, I can't tell the difference between DHH's opinion of Windows and the average Unix expert's opinion of Windows. And I hope for the sake of Atwood's blood pressure that he never encounters PG's hilarious line about Windows NT from "Great Hackers".

The argument about OSes has long since left the realm of useful debate about relative merits and become some sort of brand-identification circlejerk. Apple is always going to win that war because Windows, for as long as it is dominant, will always be bourgeois. It's the same with Sam Adams vs. Budweiser.<p>That's the price you pay for achieving ubiquity. You forfeit the hipster dufus demographic.

Douchebaggery, indeed.<p>In my experience, the people who get tweaked when someone like DHH expresses a strong opinion, are usually the same ones to suck the creativity and excitement out of any room they enter.<p>Unless you're planning to work with DHH, what do you care what he thinks about your laptop? Learn to deal.

<p><pre><code> OS X == (UI niceness &#62; windows) + (coding tools like unix) </code></pre> I don't see how you can argue with that much. I prefer to code on linux. I prefer to have a window manager and desktop apps that work @ home. Add the fact that the macs are the nicest laptops of all in terms of features and form factor, and there doesn't seem to be any other comparison.

I have had nothing but trouble when it comes to programming web environments in Windows. In <i>any</i> language be it PHP, Ruby, etc. and so forth, there's too much "Oh, it acts differently in Windows."<p>Most of it is related to POSIX environments vs. Windows, but I digress...

I used FreeBSD as my development platform until I got a Mac. The reason why is because the majority of websites are hosted on `nix platforms and as a programmer it's important for me to understand and experience the platform that my code is going to be running on.<p>If I was a Windows programmer I wouldn't know about cron, symlinks, du, etc... And I might waste an exceptional amount of time trying to code an already available feature in `nix.

<i>Y Combinator is (we hope) visited mostly by hackers. The proportions of OSes are: Windows 66.4%, Macintosh 18.8%, Linux 11.4%, and FreeBSD 1.5%. The Mac number is a big change from what it would have been five years ago.</i><p>(<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html</a>)<p>The percentage of Mac-using Y Combinator founders appears to be even higher. Actually the majority, I think.

I don't see how what DHH said translates to "OSX/Rails is the best platform ever!".<p>It seems to me that he's just saying you should care about your tools, and pick the one you think is the best (and be prepared to justify it, if you apply to 37Signals). Don't just default to Windows/Java/Blub.

In general, I couldn't give a rat's ass about any of this. But I must say that 3 months ago I switched back to a Mac after 10 years away, and while I like it much, much better than Windows, it's absolute bullshit to talk about Apple or Mac OS X like the quality is infinitely better. On that front, I find both my hardware and software to be just as flaky and crappy as the Dell/Windows hell to which I had become accustomed. Laptop wakes from sleep? Usually. Machine locks up? Rarely, but sometimes. Crummy wireless mouse works? Usually. &#60;sigh&#62;...

"David (heinemeier Hansson) gets off on putting other people down."<p>And there's a pretty serious backlash appearing on the horizon because of it. If Jeff Atwood, who is normally a really nice and straight guy, starts writing personal attacks then I think that DHH has a potential problem.<p>Note: I don't personally have anything against DHH, I've met him once and hes one of the smartest guys I've talked to. He even bought the beer...

From the article: I'd expect hard core OSS folks to want Freedom Zero in their operating system as well as the software they build.<p>I expect freedom zero for my hardware. OpenCores ( <a href="http://www.opencores.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.opencores.org/</a> ) and Arduino ( <a href="http://www.arduino.cc/" rel="nofollow">http://www.arduino.cc/</a> ) is a good start.

I use OSX at home, and windows at work. No big surprise there. So when I first learned about Ruby on Rails, I did the intro tutorial on both platforms.<p>I had to install Ruby on windows. My Mac had ruby pre-installed, but it shipped with a broken ruby, so I had to reinstall.<p>I had to install a few patches to get the very first tutorials to work on my Mac. It was seamless on Windows.<p>Since then, it has been more of a pleasure to code on the mac than the windows. I'm also a lot better able to deal with remote hosting, because I'm going from unix to unix, rather than windows to unix.<p>That said, I was surprised that it took a bit more struggling on a Mac, considering that the 27Signals team is very mac-centril.

I guess the main issue is, people who are too much into free software may sometimes loose their grasp of reality<p>You frequent slashdot, this site, the serverside and number of other FOSS wikis and blogs, and you start to think that most ppl would agree, that x is better than y and that MS is evil<p>But in real life, most ppl havent heard of slahdot, or arc and think python is a myth<p>And this is why DHH for them will definitely sound like a douchebag, and to be fair, if you compare RoR to a product like Sharepoint (yes you can use RoR to create stuff you can create with Sharepoint) if Sharepoint can do it, Sharepoint will be light years ahead of RoR.

For most purposes the leading three (including minor variations thereof) are all good enough to get the job done. OSs have essentially become commodities, just like web browsers and relational databases. Who cares. Let's move on to something that really matters for application development.

Ever hear of a guy named John Carmack, DHH? He develops on Windows. I'm sure he'll be crushed to find out that he won't be able to get a job at 37 Signals.

Sounds like judging a race car driver for the pavement he races on.