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Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming

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Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming

#101

Post by JoeAltmaier »

mark_undoio wrote: post #100
praptak wrote: post #83

My closest to religious experience was a C program crashing after removing an unused variable. I repeated this and tested multiple times by adding and removing the variable and running the program. Now I obviously have a believable rational hypothesis for that behaviour but then it was mystical. I left the variable and got a passing grade (it was a student program).

Computers are extremely haunted. It's often remarkably they were working at all before you made the change, then you prod and all the goblins come out. Similar experiences I've had: * Putting a big array on a stack (early in C programming career) - compiles fine, instant crash at runtime. * Colleague discovers that a function needs padding with NOPs to achieve precise timing. Number of NOPs needed varies depending on…

2nd may have been a race. That would be the first thing I looked for anyway.

Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming

#103

Post by kragen »

benj111 wrote: post #87
teddyh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Your use of the ASCII character sequences `` and '' as substitutes for “ and ” are antiquated at best 30 year old thing does thing that was common 30 years ago. You know the book uses outdated terminology and probably doesn't use colour.

yeah, and i think it's really unfortunate that we ended up with unix aping the misguided font choices of microsoft windows on this point instead of microsoft windows adopting the superior choice previously made by unix

Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming

#104

Post by mark_undoio »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #101
mark_undoio wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computers are extremely haunted. It's often remarkably they were working at all before you made the change, then you prod and all the goblins come out. Similar experiences I've had: * Putting a big array on a stack (early in C programming career) - compiles fine, instant crash at runtime. * Colleague discovers that a function needs padding with NOPs to achieve precise timing. Number of NOPs needed varies depending on…

2nd may have been a race. That would be the first thing I looked for anyway.

That one confounded us for a while. There was no true parallelism going on in the system but the code that needed nop padding was the interrupt handler.

That it needed padding wasn't unreasonable - we had tight timing constraints. It would have absolutely made sense for it to race with another part of the system but that didn't seem to be the nature of the interaction. The interrupt handler could always run when it wanted to.

The eventual deduction: the flash memory had 256 byte pages at hardware level. I inferred that there's some initial access cost to open a page (and probably cache it into SRAM or something).

The build was putting later functions in the file at later addresses, so what you put in other functions changed the alignment of the interrupt handler. If you requested 256 byte alignment for that function then you still needed nop padding but it was completely consistent.

Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming

#105

Post by faitswulff »

beebmam wrote: post #82
raphlinus wrote: post #33

A lot of the cultural phenomena around Rust can best be explained in religious terms. It's no accident that we are sometimes referred to as the "Rust Evangelism Strike Force," and the word "zealot" is frequently used, of course largely by critics. There's a deeper level as well. The concept of "memory safety" which is a core principle of Rust has, I believe, a lot in common with religious concepts of purity and clean…

When you say that the advocacy for Rustlang can be "best explained in religious terms", how did you come to the conclusion that, when quantified, the other reasons for this behavior are less than the religious one? Are you certain you are not assuming that Rustlang advocates are arguing in bad faith?

You should probably google Raph Linus

Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming

#106

Post by 3836293648 »

sircastor wrote: post #52
raphlinus wrote: post #33

A lot of the cultural phenomena around Rust can best be explained in religious terms. It's no accident that we are sometimes referred to as the "Rust Evangelism Strike Force," and the word "zealot" is frequently used, of course largely by critics. There's a deeper level as well. The concept of "memory safety" which is a core principle of Rust has, I believe, a lot in common with religious concepts of purity and clean…

I recall that at Apple, in the 90s, a man named Guy Kawasaki was Chief Evangelist at Apple, and he really connected with the community back when things were pretty rough for Apple. I actually didn’t realize that evangelist had a religious context until many years later - I thought it just meant someone who is enthusiastic and pushes the product.

Well, it does now

Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming

#107

Post by m3047 »

kragen wrote: post #25
the_af wrote: post #10

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…

terry's mental illness was not at all arguable and he has killed himself now

That may be the falsifier somebody is looking for: How much software lasts? How many programmers last?

There may not be "illegal" people but there are people who gain entry by illegal means. There may not be "suicidal" software but there is software which is so recklessly constructed that it is bound to crash and burn regardless how brightly shines the gold it showers on its creators and acolytes. There is "original sin" in programming. There is a hell of a lot of venality.

Most programmers don't last either; their lords and masters recognize this, just as lords and masters throughout history have tolerated religiosity in their serfs... up to a point.

Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming

#108

Post by teddyh »

typedfalse wrote: post #70
teddyh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is simply reporting errors considered “haranguing” and “having the audacity to insist they change it”? Do you have the same attitude towards people who report bugs in your code?

Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming

#109

Post by teddyh »

benj111 wrote: post #87
teddyh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Your use of the ASCII character sequences `` and '' as substitutes for “ and ” are antiquated at best 30 year old thing does thing that was common 30 years ago. You know the book uses outdated terminology and probably doesn't use colour.

I was not criticizing the book, I was criticizing the transcription on the web page. And a web page is continually published, so it is perfectly reasonable to expect it to be kept up to date enough to at least not look terrible on modern systems.

Re: Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming

#110

Post by the_af »

kyleyeats wrote: post #73
the_af wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think people can be canonized by others without a church, yeah. An Irish Catholic might fight me if I insult St. Patrick. A wokester might fight me if I insult George Floyd. A techie might fight me if I insult Elon or Stallman. The behavior is there and very real, and whether it's fueled by a religious or abstract idea is completely irrelevant to me if I don't share those beliefs. If someone does canonize Stallman,…

Stallman isn't dressed as Jesus, but as a (mock) saint named Saint Ignucious. Get it? "Gnu".

> But you already don't believe there's a supernatural element

I didn't mention my own beliefs whatsoever. In order to note all of the examples in TFA are wrong, I don't need to refer to my own beliefs.

The rest of your comment... I just don't know how to engage with it. So I guess I won't.

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