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We are not here to argue about which one is a better operating system. There are a lot of good operating systems and a lot of learning that you can do from them. This is rather
an opinion that we have formed over the years of interacting with IT personnel, teaching students and developing along with other fellow developers. People with a no UNIX
background simply do not get it. Rather on the other hand, people with UNIX background had a fair amount of understanding of some or most of these terminology:
- What services are running on the machine
- Sockets, network stats, nslookup etc.
- File manipulation using most of the standard programs like grep, sed, awk, pipe etc.
- General awareness of Telnet, ftp, wget etc.
Now the statement is not to make as though for example Windows users have no way of knowing about these. But say an aspiring computer science engineer would need to have knowledge
on these, and people who work on UNIX flavours tend to know more on these.
Going to the next level, here is a quote from a white paper that inspired Carlo Strozzi, the creator of NoSQL:
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... almost all [database systems] are software prisons that you must get into and leave the power of UNIX behind. [...]
The resulting database systems are large, complex programs which degrade total system performance, especially when they
are run in a multi-user environment. [...] UNIX provides hundreds of programs that can be piped together to easily
perform almost any function imaginable. Nothing comes close to providing the functions that come standard with UNIX.
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We are big SQL fans, but the statement lets out the power of UNIX at some levels. Another important factor is that, a basic knowledge of UNIX makes you understand what was going on
in Mr. Strozzi's mind right away. For a person who has only used for example Windows, to appreciate the above sentences takes quite a bit of effort not just because it is all about UNIX.
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