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Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming
61–70 of 122 posts
Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming
#62One 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 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…
On the 4 simple programs vs a complex one...I feel this a microcosm of the microservices vs monoliths discussion, which can also devolve into quasi-religious battles.
Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming
#63> You've been visited by St. Ignucious. Upvote for success in FOSS
St. Ignucious would not use the term 'FOSS': https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html
Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming
#64Great post, but I don't think the author really knows what 'flamer' means when he uses it to describe Linus Torvalds
Flamer: One who flames people on the internet, often the wearer of asbestos underwear, a frequent participant in flame wars.
Linus has flamed plenty of people
Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming
#65What sort of religious/spiritual folklore could we come up with? Turing meeting his end with the apple is an obvious one, but I'd rather imagine that, for having brought computing to the mortals, he's chained to a rock in perpetuity, when he attempts to port DOOM to the ACE, only to be foiled each evening when the moths show up and immolate themselves, destroying various valves, requiring him to start afresh each mor…
I did a stint at an old monastery in Estonia that was converted into a sort of hostel for international programmers. I was assigned a dorm where I spent much of my time wearing simple muted clothes, quietly writing code on an old computer with an IBM mechanical keyboard, just like all the other programmers. When we were not writing code, we did chores around the monastery, usually I was sweeping the cobblestones or f…
Very nice story.
Something like this would appeal to me, actually. It reminds me of Nesin Mathematics Village in Turkey. There are also some similarities to Recurse Center, where I did do a 3-month batch in 2017. It also has a library with some rare items, and a good collection of retrocomputing artifacts.
Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your argument is that, what, religions aren't real? Then you're saying that this stuff doesn't count because it's... also not real? What's the difference between a person being religious and a person acting religious? To a non-believer I mean.
Religious people are very real. But the example from the article are not example of religious people. At best it is parody of it. The difference is that the religious really believe in their nonsense. While the people "acting religious" are actually making fun of it.
No, they aren't. There's no separation between the religious and the non-religious. What atheists describe as religiousness is actually just how humans work.
Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your argument is that, what, religions aren't real? Then you're saying that this stuff doesn't count because it's... also not real? What's the difference between a person being religious and a person acting religious? To a non-believer I mean.
No, my argument is that none of the examples given by the author are of people acting religious. The most obvious one is the photo of Stallman that opens the article, posing as "Saint Ignucious": that's a joke, and Stallman is a self-declared atheist. Likewise, "Folklore.org" is a website about the early history of Apple; anecdotes told by the people who were there; there's nothing spiritual or mystic about it. I als…
If you can't make the distinction without an internal testament, then yeah that's a religious idea. It's the mark of a religious idea.
Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, my argument is that none of the examples given by the author are of people acting religious. The most obvious one is the photo of Stallman that opens the article, posing as "Saint Ignucious": that's a joke, and Stallman is a self-declared atheist. Likewise, "Folklore.org" is a website about the early history of Apple; anecdotes told by the people who were there; there's nothing spiritual or mystic about it. I als…
If you can't make the distinction without an internal testament, then yeah that's a religious idea. It's the mark of a religious idea.
I honestly don't understand what you mean. Can you challenge one of my assertions more directly, so that I can better understand?
For example, do you believe Folklore.org is about what people commonly understand as "folklore"; or that Stallman believes himself a saint; or that programming "religious wars" (e.g. vim vs emacs, or Linux vs Windows) are truly religious in nature? Do you believe when people talk about the "Dragon Book" they revere it as a mystical book, or that someone believes the Tao of Programming is truly a religious text?
Religion has permeated and shaped common language so that a lot of the expressions we use originally had a religious meaning but don't anymore. Others, like "crusade" or "religious wars", or even "evangelize" are not meant to be taken literally, they just evoke religious imagery but nowadays often mean something else.
Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming
#69I 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…
Probably no religions, probably no philosophies, but maybe some mythologies? And at least a couple of shared cultures?
I would say there's hacker culture, humor and tradition, yes. Even ideology (what is Free/Libre Sofware if not an ideology?). If that's what you mean.
But religiosity or mysticism? Not in programming, though of course individual hackers probably run the gamut from religious to atheist, with all beliefs in between.
TFA is a joke, by the way. The author obviously understands this. But I'm worried it will get interpreted literally. For example, by the person who submitted it to HN.
Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
if geoffrey james asks me to i'll take it down but i've had it online for i think 26 years and i don't think he minds http://canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming
Your use of the ASCII character sequences `` and '' as substitutes for “ and ” are antiquated at best. It only looked good on old X11 fonts, and that was a misfeature of those fonts to begin with. There is also many mistakes in your text: Where, in 1.1, your web page has “The user is pleased and there exists harmony in the world.”, my book (7th edition) has “The user is pleased and there is harmony in the world.” In…
Imagine haranguing someone on the internet for work they did nearly 30 years ago, and having the audacity to insist they change it.