Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming

Much of it has been reduced to memeing on the Internet using crude or overused jokes.

It all has it's place when compared to the bland seriousness of real work.

I've only got a second, but feel the need to highlight the Technical Interview series[1] and the many fan-works that pay homage to it. I enjoyed the anthropomorphising of a Package Manager Murder Mystery[2], and the creative writing of Common Tech Jobs Described as Cabals of Mesoamerican Wizards[3].

1: https://aphyr.com/tags/interviews 2: https://artemis.sh/2022/04/11/package-manager-murder-mystery... 3. https://etiennefd.substack.com/p/common-tech-jobs-described-...

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."

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.

You still find plenty people harping on about the Unix Philosophy, even though that in modern times it's nigh irrelevant, and significant parts of it are technically obsolete. Yeah, parsing text streams was sorta okay in the 80s, but is very troublesome and brittle in the modern age.

And there's an odd amount of people who are still mentally stuck on the Linux of the 90s and having trouble to understand that things have gotten more complicated since then, and software has had to adapt to things like laptops and wifi.

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 trappings of Taoism but is not to be taken seriously as a religious or spiritual text.

When someone says a programming book is "the Bible of X" this is no more religious than when videogame creators refer to their documents collecting their fantasy world data as "their bible", as in "the Fallout bible". This is just borrowing the popular image of the Bible as the "authority" on something. It's common usage, not religious.

TempleOS is an outlier, and not a good example. Its author is arguably mentally ill. If I remember correctly he is also a bigot, and nobody would claim bigotry is an essential part of working with computers.

It's not true that most hackers are Buddhists, where's the evidence for that?

Folklore.org is about anecdotes about early Apple (I wouldn't discount some have religion as the background because I haven't read them all, but I can attest the vast majority are non spiritual in nature, and instead about nerds, tech and infighting). They are fascinating because Apple is a major player and its early history is full of quirky anecdotes. It's not folklore in the sense of gnomes and ghosts.

Stallman is an atheist; his "saintly" photo is a joke.

And so on, and so on. I know the author of TFA knows all this; I bet most readers of HN also do. So why am I such a bore?

Because someone will take this literally.