Larry Wall on religion and Perl culture (1999)
techgnosis.com
Larry Wall on religion and Perl culture (1999)
1–10 of 64 posts
Re: Larry Wall on religion and Perl culture (1999)
#2I first saw this on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fje57 and thought it deserved HN's quality of discussion.
The original link is actually http://www.feedbag.com/re/re172_master.html but is much harder to read and shoves the interview itself off onto a second, hard-to-find page.
Re: Larry Wall on religion and Perl culture (1999)
#3It never fails to amaze me how otherwise very intelligent and thoughtful people remain stuck believing in God. I must say I can't help feel a little less impressed with people when I learn they are theists.
Re: Larry Wall on religion and Perl culture (1999)
#4lol:
FEED: The hacker community is full of very cantankerous and opinionated individuals. Have you gotten much grief for being so open about your Christian beliefs?
WALL: I've had no difficulty with it....I see God looking down on all these weird, cantankerous people, and kinda liking them, in an artistic fashion....There are certainly a bunch of what I would clearly label sinners out there....
Re: Larry Wall on religion and Perl culture (1999)
#5It never fails to amaze me how otherwise very intelligent and thoughtful people remain stuck believing in God. I must say I can't help feel a little less impressed with people when I learn they are theists.
Why? Different axioms are just different, and they can't be argued logically because logic only follows from the axioms. The only arguments you can make for axioms are how useful they are and, more importantly, how well you think they reflect reality as you understand it. If one of his axioms is that not every truth has objective empirical evidence to support it, how can you formulate an argument against that? All you can say is that you don't see the world as operating that way, but you certainly can't use logic or reason to argue that he's incorrect.
Re: Larry Wall on religion and Perl culture (1999)
#6It never fails to amaze me how otherwise very intelligent and thoughtful people remain stuck believing in God. I must say I can't help feel a little less impressed with people when I learn they are theists.
It never fails to amaze me how otherwise very intelligent and thoughtful people remain stuck believing that it's relevant whether or not someone believes in God. I must say I can't help feel a little less impressed with people when I learn they are condescending.
Re: Larry Wall on religion and Perl culture (1999)
#7It never fails to amaze me how otherwise very intelligent and thoughtful people remain stuck believing in God. I must say I can't help feel a little less impressed with people when I learn they are theists.
Re: Larry Wall on religion and Perl culture (1999)
#8It never fails to amaze me how otherwise very intelligent and thoughtful people remain stuck believing in God. I must say I can't help feel a little less impressed with people when I learn they are theists.
But seriously.
I don't think it's pragmatically relevant. I'm personally what you might call a soft-atheist, and I can tell you that when it comes down to brass tacks, my general disinterest in theism or atheism of any sort does little to inform my coding.
It does, however, seem fair to say that if Wall's self-assessment is to be believed, then at least some part of his personality and personal history, which ultimately led him to developing Perl, was tightly coupled with his experiences in Christianity. Of course, I'm not saying that Christianity is somehow responsible for Perl, or that it offered a unique addition in any metaphysical way. Perhaps a near religious interest in Harry Potter would have done the same thing. I'm saying that I value social and cultural diversity as much as nature values genetic diversity. For the most part, there is a large body that seems to generally be "right," but occasionally, from the outliers and mutations, you get something that is a novel and valuable contribution.
One thing that I love about my personal tendency toward atheism is that nothing is telling me I have to care at all about what someone else's spiritual beliefs are. I'm left blissfully capable of simply looking at what they have to offer humanity, while ignoring the things that I don't think are relevant. In this case, I think the relevance of walls contribution to the world of software development is patently obvious, and anyone who would defame that on some bogus spiritual grounds is, at best, looking to give themselves a quick public pat on the back.
Re: Larry Wall on religion and Perl culture (1999)
#9It never fails to amaze me how otherwise very intelligent and thoughtful people remain stuck believing in God. I must say I can't help feel a little less impressed with people when I learn they are theists.
I fail to understand how intelligence and being a theist are inversely related. I've always thought that there were serious limits to what science can prove. There are limits we what we can directly observe and indirect observation is significantly less reliable if you can't duplicate the predicted cause.
Re: Larry Wall on religion and Perl culture (1999)
#10It never fails to amaze me how otherwise very intelligent and thoughtful people remain stuck believing in God. I must say I can't help feel a little less impressed with people when I learn they are theists.
What do you think God is? Evangelical atheists want him to be a straw man poking his head of the clouds Monty-Python-style; but what if God is just a metaphor for everything greater than the reality we are capable of understanding in our tiny carbon-based brains? Do you really want to believe that the only things that matter in life are those that can be hypothesized, measured, and analyzed with physical instruments?
If the answer is yes, that's fine, but remember that you are taking that assertion on faith. There is simply no evidence one way or the other about what lies outside the bounds of human knowledge.