Secret Sauce Explanation to Web 2.x

I was looking for a particular reference to help a Unix-centric friend deal with some new Windows requirements at his employer, and found Joel Spolsky's excellent article on Biculturalism in Software. In the article, Joel talks about the cultural differences between Windows programmers and Unix programmers, and concludes that their target audiences and metrics of excellence have a key difference: Windows programmers program for the end user, and Unix programmers program for other programmers. Don't return anything unless there's an error, make your output textual, eschew the GUI, use command-line switches, etc. The Unix pipe culture of sending one program's output to the next program's input. I think this explains why Web 2.x is taking off like gangbusters, particularly the mashups. It's XML and regularized schema. The "this output will be someone else's input" folks *and* the "I want it to be readable and pretty" folks can be happy at the same time. Just sayin'.