I'll bet you popped in here expecting some kind of troll, huh?

There is an interesting article over at Joel On Software (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Biculturalism.html) that is part book review (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0131429019/ref%3Dnosim/joelonsoftware/102-7237936-8212139) and part essay on programming culture.

I'll bet you popped in here expecting some kind of troll, huh?

Yep. :)

Good article, though. I like much of Mr. Spolsky's (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/) stuff. Even (or especially) when he gets up on his soapbox.

I have a strong Unix programming background. I initially started out using AmigaOS then moved on to BeOS and Linux. I did use almost all the consumer OS'es at the time, but those are the ones I did serious programming on. I practically grew up with the Unix and Open Source/Free Software movements, I've been using Emacs since '88 (?).

The first time I compiled a Windows application, and for that matter, used Windows consecutively longer than a single week was in the fall of 2002, some months into the development of Space Station Manager. Cross compiling from Linux to Windows turned out not to work very well, even if the API was the same (Java and a bit of SDL at the time) the bugs were still different.

What it really boiled down to was the following choice: Do I want to do perfect programs or do I want to run a successfull business? Up to that point, my first fifteen years of programming had been a positive to the first part of the question. Not that I hadn't worked professionally before, there were just so many programming jobs that didn't require you to use Windows (Java only ran on Solaris in '95 ... Hi Cas :)).

So I decided to embrace change. I did a full backup of my source tree on Linux, reformatted the hard disk and added a single Windows XP partition. The first few days were fantastic, everything was really strange and different. I loved the feeling of learning new things, and after a while I got my first DirectX application running. I haven't used Linux for more than briefs moments after that, and never on my desktop.

Have I lost my old culture? No, I still do much of the game with scripts and text files, something that has made the game easy to mod. The universal truths haven't changed and I've taken many good things with me. But my core paradigm has changed. I still do my outmost to make beautiful programs, but I am much more ready to accept something half completed if it serves my players well enough. On the large, I no longer program so much for programming itself, but more to fill a need for someone else. In short, I am programming for users (and now adding a script interface as an aftertought ..:))

Accepting that fate has been one of my turning points. Someone wrote that the most common question asked of immigrants is "When are you returning home?". All immigrants know that the answer to the question is never. You have changed and what once was home has drifted away in time.