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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.
Objective-C isn't in the list. And that makes me happy.
IMHO,
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
What do you mean "If"?! As a young man, I was saved by the one true C.
Are you sure you can assert that?
No, the 90s where a turbulent time filled with drugs, rock music and Java. I've largely lost my way for the cheap harlot of a language that runs on any platform. In a way, I miss the sharp sting of the preachers segfault against my knuckles, the way I would allocate and deallocate memory night after night over and over. Sometimes I look back and long for the purity that once was ... and curse the Sun Microsystem that lead me astray from the good letter.
Often at home I resolve to code only in an efficient language. But in the morning when I wake up, I take the paycheck and do what greed drives me to do: Java.
My work here is dung.
"COBOL would be Ancient Paganism - There was once a time when it ruled over a vast region and was important, but nowadays it's almost dead, for the good of us all. Although many were scarred by the rituals demanded by its deities, there are some who insist on keeping it alive even today."
COBOL is more likely Freemasonry - While claiming to be born before C and Java(and we ask, 'this is a hard teaching!'), it espouses concepts much more ancient, and as yet not disproven in utility. It works unseen, underpinning most of society, gains little public respect (indeed scorn and distrust), and occasionally becomes noticable, usually in crisis not entirely of its own making. Adherents are dying off, but fear not; COBOL still fills a need, and while many Post-Modern competitors rise and fall, COBOL lives on, doing whatever it does, quietly, efficiently, daring all pretenders to replace it. Many have indeed succumbed. Be wary of annoying this breed. They have access to all your bases.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Basically violence has nothing to do with religion. People will use ANY religion as an excuse to justify their view they they are right and everyone else is wrong.
Imagine if you could present a complete mathematical proof with no wiggle room at all that a particular cultural viewpoint was just plain wrong.
Your average secular Joe might think about it and concede that they were wrong, and something might actually change for the better. Or they might just say "that sounds very nice, but I like my old opinion better".
A theist can stick their fingers in their ears and chant litanies, and is indeed, far more likely to, because their doctrine includes inbuilt mechanisms that tell them to resist all questions and doubts. They might even obey the instructions in their doctrine that tell them to destroy those with world views that conflict with theirs.
A scientist would examine and attempt to verify the other fellows position - and if he was right, may actually thank him for the enlightenment.
Yes, people will do violence for other reasons. But religion is inherently inflexible in a world where the one constant is change, produces a sense of entitlement to use any means - because the end is "Gods Will", and religious texts often contain actual explicit instructions to do violence to individuals and cultures that do not comply.
I do not concur that religion and violence are unassociated.
The parent's post might be worded rather harshly and somewhat unfairly, but the general point is valid.
During the Danish cartoon incident, I was quite surprised that the primary reaction of moderate Islam wasn't condemning the violence of their fellow Muslims, but rather insisting that the cartoonist should not have insulted their prophet.
So you've shown that religion isn't necessary for violence. I don't think that's what anyone is saying. Would you say it's easier or harder to organize a violent effort when religion is involved?
They worship the same damn god.
This is the popular belief, but it doesn't stand up well to academic scrutiny. The Jewish, Muslim, and Christian gods can be traced back to different ancestral deities, which became fused as monotheism (belief in one and only one god) gradually replaced monolatry (belief in many gods, but worship of only one).
The Judaic god is Yahweh. The Muslim god is Allah, formerly El (the etymology survives as Elohim in the Bible, as well as in the names of the archangels, Gabri-El, Rafa-El, Micha-El, Uri-El). El was a sky god, and therefore a king of the gods, like Zeus. (Elohim is a plural form, and probably originally referred to El plus his lesser gods, analogous to the Olympians.) In Judaism, Yahweh took over El's duties either by absorbing a neighbouring tribe that worshipped El, or by the mythological feat of overthrowing El and taking over the King of gods position, as did Zeus, when the Jews had risen to a position of political and military power that clearly signaled the ascendance of Yahweh. In any case, Yahweh absorbed many of the aspects of El, and after several rounds of edits, they came to be referred to interchangeably but not especially consistently in the Old Testament. El survived this fusion outside of Jewish realms, but because of Judaism's superior documentation of the matter, the fusion was accepted by later religions such as Islam.
The Christian god is Jesus, an entirely different figure who took on all of the myths and characteristics of Roman Empire sun gods. Sun gods generally were fathered by the king of the gods, and birthed by a virgin. That meant that Jesus worshipers needed two more gods, a father and virgin mother, to fit the sun god archetype. But the trinity idea didn't work so well with the trendy monotheism thing, and kind of distracted from Jesus himself. After a couple centuries of various heresies, purges, and whatnot, the Christians got it all sorted out: the trinity was really just facets of the same monotheistic god; the Father was the abstracted god in heaven, easily equated with Yahweh-El (or any other local King god, which was how it got sold to the Romans); Jesus was the real manifestation of that God on earth; and the Virgin got booted from the Trinity because there was no room for another god or another person. (Nevertheless, the Virgin cult has survived in many respects to this day.)