I find a decent amount of fault with this article, but it's not all bad. It starts off with a really cool premise and then goes on to equate "programmer culture" with using the command line. I think the author is spot on when he describes how user's think about software/apps, but obviously the command line is not the be all and end all of how programmers think about software, it's just (a very important) one of many tools.
One group of people have no idea what programming is, the other group do. It's not that complicated. There is no user/programmer culture divide, it's simply a matter of understanding a complex topic or not.
I think a lot of "programmers" use apps and other software like "users", but when something goes wrong we like to hunt down the solution and fix it, and I think that explains why it is not uncommon to hear programmers complaining about how stupid the people who wrote the software they use everyday must be; because it can be frustrating and annoying when it ends up being something really obscure.
Programmers have a better understanding of how software works, but just like everyone else we get frustrated and annoyed when our app's crash. We can complain in more elaborate and accurate ways than the average person is all.
The command line is just an example of the division you may see between university academic departments and business areas in a large company.
What the writer calls "programmer culture" may well involve running Linux. Then using OpenOffice or Google Docs or LaTeX instead of Word and Excel leading to messed up formatting any time documents are passed back and forth. Maybe sending presentations around as PDFs - which Windows users can't edit. Can I, a Linux-using programmer, understand why you'd want to connect a spreadsheet to a database? It boggles the mind. No, don't bother to send it to me, I can't open excel files. And in the opposite direction, us Linux users will happily recommend software that works great for us, and which is notionally cross-platform, but on other platforms the user experience is much worse. And that's just for technology which has barely changed since Office 95. God forbid if you want to embed a video into a presentation and have it play on several platforms.
One group of people have no idea what programming is, the other group do. It's not that complicated. There is no user/programmer culture divide, it's simply a matter of understanding a complex topic or not.
I think a lot of "programmers" use apps and other software like "users", but when something goes wrong we like to hunt down the solution and fix it, and I think that explains why it is not uncommon to hear programmers complaining about how stupid the people who wrote the software they use everyday must be; because it can be frustrating and annoying when it ends up being something really obscure.
Programmers have a better understanding of how software works, but just like everyone else we get frustrated and annoyed when our app's crash. We can complain in more elaborate and accurate ways than the average person is all.