Yes, Carmack did like NeXTStep a lot. With that said, most of his career Windows was his main dev box. Even post Doom he went back to Windows as his main desktop:
"The upside is that windows really doesn't suck nowdays. Win 95 / NT 4.0 are pretty decent systems for what they are targeted at. I currently develop mostly on NT, and Quake 2 will almost certainly be delivered on win32 first."
http://rmitz.org/carmack.on.operating.systems.html
And more importantly, as it relates to DHH's statement, excluding Windows developers isn't like some odd niche. It's probably a healthy percentage of the best developers in the world. Fortunately for DHH he's at a webdev shop where pure coding skill is probably less important than cultural fit.
Fortunately for DHH he's at a webdev shop where pure coding skill is probably less important than cultural fit.
I would argue that, at most programming jobs coding skill is less important than cultural fit, once you've passed the level of "reasonably competent developer."
And more importantly, as it relates to DHH's statement, excluding Windows developers isn't like some odd niche. It's probably a healthy percentage of the best developers in the world. Fortunately for DHH he's at a webdev shop where pure coding skill is probably less important than cultural fit.