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> websites like The Tao Of Programming The Tao of Programming is not a website. It’s a book . If you saw the whole thing on a web site, that was an illegal copy. Of course, it was also most certainly missing the illustrations, foreword, etc.
There is no "illegal copy".
I’ll add a footnote to this post, it captures the spirit well.
If anyone has suggestions for things to add to my list it’d be much appreciated
One weird thing I noticed over time is the enshrinement of old and crappy technologies, in the face of all reason. Some examples: Some people for some reason I can't understand have warm and fuzzy feelings about FTP, despite it being a horrible protocol in multiple ways. Yet, for a long time it was often thought of being the "proper" way to download stuff, even though even HTTP is technically better in many respects.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no "illegal copy".
A copy made by infringing copyright, then.
I hate to be a kill joy, but none of these are true examples of religion or mysticism. They are at best playful examples of hacker culture, and at worst examples of arguments with opinions "strongly held"; i.e. flamewars. "Religious wars" in tech is not to be taken literally, nobody thinks these are spiritual in nature; it's an analogy to the fury of real world religious wars. The Tao of Programming takes the trappin…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel the need to be "that guy" cause this is hacker news, but the Unix philosophy isn't really about parsing text streams, it's about decomposability of a problem. It's way easier to test and debug 4 simple programs feeding into one another other like a flow chart than building a mega program with an insane internal state (the your problem can be decomposed into 4 subproblems). The basic core revelation that the Un…
Everything has good and bad cases where it can be applied of course. But I see this as a good example of a religious issue because you can often find people think that it's a principle worth rigidly adhering to, regardless of whether it actually does produce better results in a given case. For instance my experience is that such a model tends to get bad when things get sufficiently complex. Things like GPG and cdreco…
I, for one, would very much prefer GPG to be decomposed to follow the unix philosophy - I think I would have a much easier time understanding and composing commands like `gpg-sign --keyfile ~/mykeyfile somefile | gpg-encrypt --to ~/someperson.pub | gpg-asciiarmor > somefile.gpg` than whatever the monolithic incantation is. This would make it much less painful to interact with, especially because GPG is doing a series of transformations on either streams of text or raw binary.
Very endearing post :). I’m keeping a collection of computing holy wars that I come across if anyone wants to check it out: https://josh8.com/blog/wars_of_computing.html I’ll add a footnote to this post, it captures the spirit well. If anyone has suggestions for things to add to my list it’d be much appreciated
One weird thing I noticed over time is the enshrinement of old and crappy technologies, in the face of all reason. Some examples: Some people for some reason I can't understand have warm and fuzzy feelings about FTP, despite it being a horrible protocol in multiple ways. Yet, for a long time it was often thought of being the "proper" way to download stuff, even though even HTTP is technically better in many respects.…
I much prefer Unix philosophy to contenerized microservices for Todo list app philosophy.
Related academic publication: "Worship, Faith, and Evangelism: Religion as an Ideological Lens for Engineering Worlds", Ames, Rosner, Erickson,2015 "...a common ideological framework that appears across four engineering endeavors: the OLPC Project, the National Day of Civic Hacking, the Fixit Clinic, and the Stanford d.school."
Laurent Bossavit's "The Leprechauns of Software Engineering"[1] is fun and accessible. It claims that much of what we consider fact in software engineering is actually folklore.