UNIX being part of OS X is a historical accident, Apple just wanted to save themselves from Copland's failure.

It was the main reason a lot of people (myself included) moved to OSX from Linux. I honestly believe that its Unix compatibility was one of the main reasons Macs got popular with developers in the first place.

Macs were already popular with developers.

Apparently as someone that favors Xerox PARC way of thinking, I am not a developer, as I don't embrace the UNIX religion.

That's not what I said. I never meant to give the impression that “developers” necessarily means Unix users. A lot of them are though, definitely enough to be a noticeable fraction. The number of people in this very thread proclaiming the greatness of the Linux subsystem in Windows 10 should confirm this.

You have to admit that around 2003 or so there was a huge influx of technical users to the Mac. My proposition is that a lot of those users were developers moving from Linux (or from an unhappy Windows life, wishing they were using a Unix-based operating system).

I base this on the general sentiment at the time, and I was one of the people who made the switch. I'm sure you can find old posts from me on Slashdot talking about how great the switch was.

Now I'm on Hacker News, talking about doing the exact opposite. I'm moving away from OSX because the Unix experience has become really bad.

I agree, but on these discussions, that subset of developers just gets packaged into developers as whole, as if there wasn't anything else.

Personally I know UNIX since Xenix days, do have a vast experience across UNIX variants, use it in some form in many projects, but rather use OS X and Windows environment.

For strange as it may seem, some of us are actually happier with the GUI developer tooling culture of OS X, Windows, Android, iOS.