Unix and Literary Correlation

By Xah Lee. Date:

Christopher wrote:

In comparisons, while Xah's postings make more use of obscure English vocabulary than the others, which _might_ suggest greater “sophistication,” he then writes something that leaps out and shouts “Bad grammar!” which rather undermines the impression of sophistication.

Splendid potshot.

Want to know what i think of you? You are the archetype of bookworm: Read many, ingest little; opinion lots, original none; statistics you got, interpretation you got wrong. There is a kind of worm that sucks on blood at one end and shits blood on the other end, used to be used for bloodletting in the old med school. With regards to data, you are like that. In unix jargon, it's called a pipe.

It is interesting to note that some degree of “literary interest” http://www.jammed.com/~jwa/Misc/scoville_unix_as_literature.txt seems to also be correlated with people in the Unix community. As much as the Lisp community likes to denigrate Unix, both tend to have the common characteristic of being quite literate…

It is actually not surprising to me, that you would quote the most low quality, lurid, myth riding, tabloid-class writings by internet-proclaimed journalist. (its author is moron numero uno.) You have done damage to society now by citing that trite article celebrated by the community it eulogizes. Folks, i don't know if there's any correlation of literary penchant and unix liking, but can tell you this: The unix fanatics, are the shallowest of writers. They are all the poet, novelist, journalist, satirist, stylist, playwright who could not make it into the literary circle. (and they couldn't make it into the computer science circle either.) In their eyes, the cheapest puns, word play, and nonsense is grand literature. (the likes of Larry Wall and unix coders.) There is a mecca of these nitwits on the net, and that's slashdot.com.

Ever heard that “coders cannot write”? That's the unix folks, with their faaking man pages et al.

[DISCLAIMER: All mentioning of real persons are opinion only.]

The original article on the correlation of Unixers and Literay-interest is written by Thomas Scoville, titled The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature, written in around 2001 and widely circulated. Such total nonsense spread because from a psychological point of view, “I want to believe”.