LET THE FLAMEWARS BEGIN! Arnold Kling is weighing in on the “Version fatigue” debate, and he’s dissing Unix and Linux something fierce.

Send the hatemail to Kling, not me. I’ve already put in my two cents’ worth. One minor correction, though. Kling says that I don’t have the patience to study manuals. I do have the patience. After all, I’m a law professor who reads and writes thousand-footnote articles — it’s just that I’ve recognized that studying manuals is often wasted, since most of the knowledge contained in them will be obsolete with the next version. Not all software is that way — Sonic Foundry (which not coincidentally, keeps the same programmers working on the same things in successive versions) avoids that problem quite well. But more software should be like Sonic Foundry’s.

I do notice that the term “version fatigue” seems to be catching on. Cool.