UNIX hurts

But ma, it hurts!

Use UNIX. Even if it hurts. It will make you a man, my son. This seems to be pretty much a philosophy of most UNIX users out there. This blog is inspired by an interesting link Pradeep sent me. Pradeep is an inspired geek who, quite surprisingly has a life beyond UNIX.

UNIX is used by mathematicians, physicists, certain engineers and other masochistic folk. Most of the stuff about having absolute control on the hardware and all that is true. But then, it is an enthusiast thing. The whole point about efficiency is completely lost when people write three hours worth of code and debug it for two days to solve a problem, which they could have done with pen and paper in ten minutes. But then, that just happens to be the nature of the beast; physics is at a point where computation is frequently the only possible approach. Enter UNIX, with all its ungrateful children. And very, very quickly, you realize that you are thirty, single, either anorexic or have a junk food paunch, very little hair, no social life (talking to other geeks at department lunches does not count), no friends (here, I mean people who do not know what the Schrodinger wave equation is, or don’t care). People have stopped talking to you because you frequently mumble to yourself on the street. Mostly in Hex.


There is still time. Dump the UNIX machine. Get a Mac. Get a life.

By the way, the Macintosh OS X runs on a UNIX foundation.