I've seen a similar schism within the programming community. Web culture is of course closely related to Unix culture. The web is really an outgrowth of Unix.

I've seen a similar schism within the programming community. Web culture is of course closely related to Unix culture. The web is really an outgrowth of Unix. At places like Google, and other web companies, the Unix shell and emacs/vim reign supreme. Most people on HN work at web companies. I used to work in the game industry, and have referred several coworkers to Google. Invariably they are shocked that people still use emacs and vim, and find / xargs. They are visual people and prefer IDEs. The command line just seems primitive and unproductive. A lot of people with a Java background have a similar reaction. And no, it's not related to the quality of programmer, since James Gosling (who wrote the original emacs I think) had the same reaction to google's tool chain. I think programmers can roughly be divided into "language people" or "visual people". That is probably true of non-programmers as well. I have taught programming using the terminal and vim at Google, a web company, but I realize that in a different setting, this would be the wrong toolset. Interestingly, I would expect Unix / verbal culture to be most relevant to librarians. If you were teaching a bunch of technical artists programming, Unix would be inappropriate and almost certainly a disaster.