Someone has reposted Thomas Scoville’s article from 1998 on Unix as Literature. The article’s premise is that Unix (and these days, Linux) users are different from the users of other systems. That seems like a low calorie assertion but it’s his claim of how they differ that’s interesting. Unix users, he says, are over-represented by polyglots, people with liberal arts backgrounds, and generally those of an intellectual bent.
For years, Scoville wondered why that was and then he realized that one of the complaints from non-Unix people was that there is too much typing involved in using Unix. Windows people, as one example, don’t do that. They point and click and use menus to get things done. Unix people are more inclined to build pipelines out of obscurely named, tiny applications.
His conclusion is that Unix users are different because they are text oriented, like to read and write and are generally comfortable with wordsmithing. One might say, although he doesn’t, that Unix is the operating system for the literate.
Not even Scoville takes the premise all that seriously but I think it is true that Unix folks like—or at least don’t mind—using the command line, learning a largish collection of utilities, and putting them together in novel ways. It’s also true that others much prefer to have their workflows predefined and callable with a click. No typing required. It’s at least arguable that the first group is more likely to have literate interests. But read the article and decide for yourself.