I agree that using zsh has to be justified. My suggestions for bash users who want to get more out of their (interactive) shell are:
1. Learn bash better. Lots of low-hanging fruit there to increase your productivity with minimal effort.
2. Learn how to customize your environment in bash. Know what every line in your dotfiles does. Add to your dotfiles gradually as you learn.
3. If you learn about some cool features in zsh, see if bash has the feature already. If it doesn't, see if you can mimic it easily with your own functions or scripts.
4. If you still want more features, make the switch to zsh and repeat steps 1 and 2 with zsh.
I think the worst is when people see a novel trick and switch to zsh and slam in oh-my-zsh* without knowing any shell basics. Now you have another shell and a big pile of code and you don't understand any of it. This usually won't cause problems, but you almost certainly won't be getting the most out of your shell. You'd be better off in most cases just digging into bash a little deeper.
I use zsh now, but I only switched after learning what bash could do and what its limitations are. I'll reevaluate zsh vs. bash 4.0 at some point, but for now I see zsh installed by default more often than bash 4.0 and it seems to me that most users interested in the best interactive shell experience are still on zsh and I like to learn from them.
* - I think oh-my-zsh is a great project - I'm not knocking it. I've borrowed lots of great stuff from it. But I think you should understand every line of code you are dumping into your environment, whether you are using oh-my-zsh or not.
I was wondering about this as well. I did think that the advertisement was sexist and made the hackathon seem exclusive to men. I don't know whether this incident was just an isolated bonehead move or it reveals incorrigible bad character in the people involved. I can see it either way depending on how I stare at it, but I don't believe I have enough data to make a firm conclusion. I don't have a pressing need to do so, so I will probably just leave the question unresolved in my mind. But for the people that have made firm conclusions, it seems like the apologies make no difference.
I would ask people that are unsatisfied by Sqoot's apologies: Could they issue any apology that would satisfy you?
We are supposedly talking about how to apologize and whether they can/should offer a better apology. But if nothing can change one's mind then we are really talking about whether the offense is forgivable or not, irrespective of the content of the apology.
The sentiment expressed by xkcd is great and very liberating to ponder. But I think this is off-topic.
The blog post states that "I seldom swear much outside of my slides" and "...it’s a crafted persona". Unless I am not understanding correctly, Holman is swearing as a calculated move which he believes allows him to communicate more effectively.
The xkcd comic decries filtering expression of one's personality out of fear. Here Holman is slightly altering (filtering?) his own personality, or at least creating a persona with subtle differences, for perceived benefit. You might even say he's doing it out of fear of mediocrity, though I would hesitate to put it so strongly.
People are talking about whether swearing actually is more effective, not about whether sensibilities have been offended. Holman is not the guy in the comic that others are trying to chastise for being himself.
I agree that the phenomenon is undeniable. Commercial after commercial shows a bumbling, silly, or wrongheaded male creating a problem that an eye-rolling female armed with the advertised product is able to solve.
I used to find this mildly annoying. I thought that surely our society is sufficiently advanced that we might accept roughly equal occurrences of each gender as the goats in these commercials without it seeming disparaging to women.
But thinking this made me realize: having men as the goats is not disparaging to men, either. Now I choose to attribute the phenomenon to the conventional wisdom that men are generally less self-conscious than women. I believe there is some anecdotal evidence for this but have no idea whether it is actually true. What I do believe is that marketers perceive this to be the case and making commercials that make men look stupid will alienate fewer people in the audience, since humiliating somebody that a male viewer identifies with is, theoretically, less disquieting.
1. Learn bash better. Lots of low-hanging fruit there to increase your productivity with minimal effort.
2. Learn how to customize your environment in bash. Know what every line in your dotfiles does. Add to your dotfiles gradually as you learn.
3. If you learn about some cool features in zsh, see if bash has the feature already. If it doesn't, see if you can mimic it easily with your own functions or scripts.
4. If you still want more features, make the switch to zsh and repeat steps 1 and 2 with zsh.
I think the worst is when people see a novel trick and switch to zsh and slam in oh-my-zsh* without knowing any shell basics. Now you have another shell and a big pile of code and you don't understand any of it. This usually won't cause problems, but you almost certainly won't be getting the most out of your shell. You'd be better off in most cases just digging into bash a little deeper.
I use zsh now, but I only switched after learning what bash could do and what its limitations are. I'll reevaluate zsh vs. bash 4.0 at some point, but for now I see zsh installed by default more often than bash 4.0 and it seems to me that most users interested in the best interactive shell experience are still on zsh and I like to learn from them.
* - I think oh-my-zsh is a great project - I'm not knocking it. I've borrowed lots of great stuff from it. But I think you should understand every line of code you are dumping into your environment, whether you are using oh-my-zsh or not.