I agree with the article's points. I tend to wonder if the state of GUIs isn't as simple as "too many developers use Windows and don't look elsewhere". Window

I agree with the article's points. I tend to wonder if the state of GUIs isn't as simple as "too many developers use Windows and don't look elsewhere". Windows ships with a lousy shell and not many decent commands to build with. If most developers follow that example and don't try to learn anything else, they'll be "comfortable" even in inefficient programming environments. The Mac's an anomaly...the current OS has great command support, and while the older Mac OS didn't, its developers had access to the excellent MPW Shell. MPW Shell had features that Unix-like systems still can't match, such as the ability to assign significance to many more characters. (When the system makes it easy to enter "weird" symbols, the idea of turning them into shell metacharacters is pretty cool!) A good book on the way developers think (on Unix-like systems), is ESR's "The Art of UNIX Programming". It has great examples of how many of us would approach system and application design, that don't seem prevalent on other systems.