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If Programming Languages Were Religions
bshell writes "With Christmas around the corner I know we are all thinking about religion, or at least maybe wondering why this one religion dominates the rest for these few weeks. A fellow named Rodrigo Braz Monteiro (amz) posted this list comparing each programming language to a religion. Guaranteed to make you chuckle and generate a good long thread here on slashdot. Great way to pass the time as work winds down this week and we relate to our own programming faiths during this very special time of year. Merry PHPmas." Fortunately Pastafarianism is referenced.
amazing how offense free that is. that had to take a bit of effort.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I don't know why VB gets such a bad rap. I'm not saying it's the best language out there, but I view it as a tool in a toolbox. Sure, it might not be the tool you'll go for most often, and if you had to limit yourself to only a few languages, maybe you'd ditch it. But it is still powerful and good for some situations.
Linus is just a person with every flaw anyone else has. His opinion is nothing but one, no more important than mine or anyone else's.
His rant is that of one who knows only how to use a hammer, so everything looks like nails. You can write horrible and unmaintainable code in any language.
If you want a language that treats you like the idiot you are and only allows things one way, use VB. Otherwise you have to learn how to go around your own limitations and avoid shooting yourself on the foot.
In the end, of you do [shoot yourself on the foot] it is your own fault, it's not the language that is bad and stupid, it's YOU.
BASIC is like any Sunday School. It give you a base to start out with. Might not be on the ball with the full tenets of a religion, simplified for a new audience, but it points in the direction for deeper philosophical research.
You never expect irony, do you?
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Obviously waves of COBOL nostalgia caused your brain to shut down.
APL would be Scientology - There are many people who claim to follow it, but you've always suspected that it's a huge and elaborate prank that got out of control.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
More to the point, religions are programming languages.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Is Visual Basic is Satanism, MUMPS is the Devil himself!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS
I'm Israeli and I think I can say that you can convert to Judaism (and to C). It's just easier if you haven't tried anything else before.
No one ever said being a Heretic was easy.
Let us meet again in "Less Interesting Times"
Atheism - There is no computer ...
Agnosticism - You cannot prove there is a computer by programming ...
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
ADA is for the Christian Crusaders
Assembler is used by the Angels
VHDL is used by God
Hinduism is one of the oldest religions and one of the top 3 religions practiced throughout the world. I would have hoped that they did some research before coming with this comparison.
Yes, when I saw this article on the Firehose I really really hoped that no editor would pick it. Not only is a variation of a million times seen joke: it's a very mediocre variation as well. I mean, the "jokes" are unimaginative, feel forced and most important: the little bit of objective (no pun intended) truth that any self-respected list of this kind must contain is not present at all here. A waste if you ask me... Or maybe I just don't get it.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Quite the contrary. The people who tab-indent are those who should be burned. The tab character was the worst invention in the history of character sets. You cannot even prefix them (line numbers, diff line change prefix, email quote prefix etc.) without breaking the indentation.
Oh, and try to get people to agree how many spaces a tab should be! :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
MS would probably be the Cathloic Church. Controlling
Apple would be (Radical) Islam. Rabid Fanboys
Linux could be the hundered of branches of Christianity. However, I like Hinduism. Hinduism has many teachings, and people practise differently. Hinduism also claims Buhhdism as a subsect of Hinduism, so that opens you up to even more variation.
Spelling and Grammar errors have been added to this post for your enjoyment
I was thinking more that non-programmers/general computer users would be atheists. As far as they're concerned, computers exist and work, and software just sort of comes about on its own. All that talk of programming languages is just the socially awkward trying to develop some kind of relevance for themselves.
No. There certainly are endless ways of writing truly atrocious code.
You're also pretty damn clueless about atheists. An atheist may be just as likely to sacrifice their life. If you're an atheist, and you don't believe in the afterlife, would you not trade your life for your family's, so that they can live? Afterlife or no afterlife, most parents are willing to put themselves in the place of their child regardless of consequence, and most family members will sacrifice themselves to save *the whole rest of their family* regardless of consequence too.
I think you don't understand altruism. Your post makes it sound like the only people willing to sacrifice their lives are those that think there is an afterlife. Those people are the *selfish* ones willing to sacrifice their lives, but there are *unselfish* people out there too - believe it or not.
-Clio
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Linux could be the hundered of branches of Christianity. However, I like Hinduism. Hinduism has many teachings, and people practise differently. Hinduism also claims Buhhdism as a subsect of Hinduism, so that opens you up to even more variation.
Actually I think that would make Linux Buddhism and Unix Hinduism.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
I believe Stalin (as well as Pol Pot, and those responsible for Rwanda's genocide) adequately demonstrated that atrocities need no basis in religion. You can just as easily come up with a flawed ideology that is not based on a belief in the supernatural and use that for genocide.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Maybe the reason why these stories are interesting is that cars, religions and programming languages follow some type of convergent evolution.
That is, the development of any mechanism intended to make sense of the human condition will necessarily end up being similar.
FORTRAN - like physics problems about "how high does the baseball go when thrown at 1 meter per second", Fortran is a language you learn in college but never use in the real world.
You aren't serious, are you? Most number cruching codes in the world today are written in FORTRAN. Fluid dynamics, nuclear decay, particle interactions, structural mechanics, etc., the nuts and bolts of solving these problems is all done in FORTRAN.
But their atrocities were based in ideology, which religion is a subset of.
If one believes in a cause, perhaps one can kill for a cause.
Of course, mysticism is popular and easier to use than political beliefs..., but Stalin and Hitler were able to use other beliefs to the same effect. All of it uses a similar mantra: "you need to be afraid of the enemy, assume the worst, and strike first. To do otherwise is to let them win." Ironically the phrase 'Evil needs only for good men to do nothing' is a double edged sword.
The caveat is that for good to succeed all that is required is for evil men to do nothing.
If all causes can be used for evil, then sometimes doing nothing is the moral choice.
"I only speak the truth"
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Well but then you're not talking about religion but something else. What you're referring to is that its fairly easy to get humans to rally around any sort of idea or belief, and then paint their group as being under attack, which will provoke a defense response. Its a fundamental human nature that gave us a competitive advantage when we were still just small groups strewn about the globe.
I think people give religion too much credit. Religion is not some special-case organization, but rather a simple result of the mental quirks that evolved in humans to help us survive. You can see a lot of the behavior from people who adhere strongly to political parties, racial-supremacy groups, nations (nationalism), and even sports teams. Even the religion-is-bad crowd says a lot of shit that is stunningly similar to a lot of stuff that the religious crowd puts out.
The reality is that its a problem with humanity, not a problem with religious people. Religion just tends to be an easy and comfortable target to project their fears and anger on. Kind-of like the atheist version of Satan and heathens, so to speak. Of course, recognizing that its a human condition brings up all sorts of uncomfortable truths.
No, it's usually because people usually have no clue about what other religions did. So they have religion X for which they know evil acts A, B and C, and religion Y about which they don't know jack. So they do a jump to conclusions that religion Y was all saintly, harmonious and benevolent.
If you look at it deeper, yes, the GP is right, virtually _any_ religion that existed prior to the 20'th century at all, has been perverted into justifying some atrocities -- or at least turning a blind eye to them.
E.g., taoism is all enlightened and all about harmony and doing the right thing... but caused one of the bloodiest revolts in recorded history.
E.g., shintoism and generally the Japanese view of the world is all about purity, duty, respecting the spirits, avoiding murder and generally doing the right thing... but the mindset around it is what _caused_ such massacres of civillians as the Rape Of Nanjing or the Japanese atrocities against prisoners and civillians in WW2. The rationale was that since the enemy didn't do what the Japanese philosophy demands (e.g., fighting to the last breath, regardless of odds), they lost their right to be called humans, and can be treated like cattle. E.g., the fact that the Chinese soldiers discarded their uniforms and tried to hide among civillians, to escape the Japanese atrocities, was seen as such a breach of what a true human should do, that they and the whole city deserved nothing less than mass slaughter.
E.g., Tibetan buddhism is all enlightened and all about scoring karma points for your reincarnation... but has been a justification for the most abject slavery of most of their population. The justification being that if you were born a slave, well, you deserve that and it's your punishment for your evil deeds in a past life. So you had a religion which preached benevolence to your fellow man, and a theocratic caste treating their fellow man like shit in its name. Go figure that one out.
The religion may not have _demanded_ such massacres, and there may not have been a "pope" to decree it, but that particular view of the world was distorted into basically, "anyone who doesn't see the world exactly like us, deserves death." Go figure.
E.g., look at any "enlightened" and "noble savage" shamanistic or animistic cults, and you'll find a history of endemic warfare and slaughter, where generations after generations of young warriors are sent to rape and pillage under the shaman's blessing and guidance. In fact, the very first depictions of warfare we have on cave walls -- interestingly enough coinciding with the invention of missile weapons -- show groups of archers shooting at each other, each lead by some shaman with some holy symbol. That's how the history of human organized warfare _started_.
And I'm not even getting into ancient religions demanding a stream of human sacrifices and the like.
Look as far back as the first religious hymns we have, e.g., The Exaltation of Innana by her high priestess Enheduanna, and you'll find a disturbingly blood-thirsty girl praising her Goddess for turning major rivers red with the blood of her enemies -- soldiers and innocent bystanders alike -- and destroying their crops. That's early human religion for you.
So, pray tell, which religions do you have in mind, which _didn't_ facilitate a few choice atrocities? Again, only those which existed for any length of time, please, not late 20'th century new age cults or jokes like Pastafarianism.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
No that is nihilism, the belief in nothing. Atheism is the belief in no God.
One could define atheism with a Perl one liner as such:
my $God = undef;
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
But by not denouncing the act (or denouncing it with a "but") they are supporting it. Tacit approval, look it up.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Depends on the flavor of religion. I know a lot of Christians that would be extremely difficult to organize into violence because their flavor leans heavily on the "turn the other cheek" aspects. On the other hand, I've known atheists who have advocated taking religious peoples' children away and committing them to a mental institution. Because, you know, teaching religion is child abuse, and theists are obviously insane. No, I'm not making this up, it was quite literally their position. I've seen genocide, murder, war, suppression, and various other atrocities advocated for such a wide variety of reasons it makes my head spin. The only commonality between the people is that they were all human.
So no, I don't think its safe to say that religion necessarily will make things easier. What makes it easy is that we're human, humans have the same fundamental survival traits as other animals, and these traits can either lead to lifting ourselves up, or putting others down, depending on which we feel is more advantageous to our survival.
For example, America didn't go into Iraq because of our religion, we went into there because our leaders told us that they had WMD, and that it was plausible that they would be used against us. We went there because our leaders told us we were simply defending ourselves. All other justifications were just intended to make us feel better about what we did after the fact.
In the beginning there was the word, and the word was assembly. It is the basis of every other language. No other is so pure, so simple, and yet at the same time so complex.
You try writing a playable battle tanks game for a 4Mz Sinclair with 4k of memory in any other language. I say it can't be done.
What kind of punk kid would write a religious creed about programming without even mentioning the language that all other languages are written in (or at least the languages they were written in were written in).
Get off my lawn. Damned kids. And take your burning cross with you.
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