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The Biggest Cults In Tech
bobby f. writes "Infoworld has published its list of the biggest cults in tech — including Palmists, Newtonians, Commodorians, the Brotherhood of the Ruby, IBM power systems fanboys, Ubuntu-ists, and Lispers. A pretty fun read (unless you really are a cult member)." Although I think it's pretty clear that the Apple camp isn't an opinionated cult, they're just always right. Fire away.
It's been a very long time since I met a Newton or Palm cult member! Time to update the list.
Allow me to change the definition of "cult" slightly to "whatever belief your smart friends want you to give up". Then cult #1 is:
Name: Windows
Established: 1995
Gathering of the Tribe: InfoWorld and other magazines that pretend that everything except Windows is a "cult"
Major Deity: Bill Gates
Sacred Relic: 30-letter authorization keys
The Antichrist: Linus Torvalds
I belong to the Cult of Single Page Views, not 8-page clickfests.
Not so much fun, actually.
Strange to have 'cults in tech' and no mention of gamers, console vs pc, mmorpgers in WoW etc.
If anything was a cult it would be WoW and Evercrack.
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. -- Leo Tolstoy
Why did they list the same group twice?
especially if we're mentioning Ubuntu. Seems like windows is missing too.
A fanboi is a fanboi, even if their product actually is better.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Strangely enough the article read much the same.
http://www.infoworld.com/print/73433
very big mistake - the author forgot to mention slashdotters
I think this line is especially fitting: "The Commodore 8-bit crowd is the computer world's analogy to old-time Volkswagen bug fanciers in the car world..." Just because a technology or a product is outdated, it doesn't mean that people won't fancy it for one reason or another. A Commodore certainly isn't the most powerful computer out there anymore, but people probably still like it for the same reason they like the old-time Volkswagen beetles - it reminds them of their youth, a time when things were better than they are now, or perhaps they just haven't bothered to move on and see new things the world can offer.
What about Perl? Seems a lot more cultish (in a good way) to me than Ubuntu or RoR.
Mod points: Guaranteed to remove your sense of humor.
Side effects may include gullibility and temporary retardation
..are more like Scientologists than an cult....
Plenty of newbs are jumping aboard the Mac bandwagon now that it's trendy to do so. Mac OS X is now a certified UNIX operating system, mostly compatible with lots of Linux or FreeBSD stuff, and it runs on what is mostly off-the-shelf PC hardware including Intel CPUs.
However, some of us loved our Macs in the 1990s, when none of those things were true.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
In an earlier stage of life I worked at RadioShack, when they actually sold electronics and radio equipment. One of my co-workers was a ham radio enthusiast and would spend hours talking about the rise of the Amiga and how it would come back. It was always just a few months away from releasing a new OS or platform. I would wager if I went back to that store... Or perhaps the store that replaced it, since RadioShack is just a shell of its former self he would still extoll the virtues of Amiga and it's imminent resurgence. Then he'd mutter about how Gateway killed it because the technology was too advanced for the average PC user to accept.
We friars of Forth our outraged at your constant disre...Hey, I'm talking here. Hey, pay attention, I'm talking here! Hrmph, Forth gets no respect. No respect at all.
Demented But Determined.
Come on, emacs users all but invented the IT Cult.
(...TFA confuses language and framework, but that's not my gripe.)
And Rails people creep me out. Sorry, y'all just do. You guys didn't invent MVC, and the fact is we've all been ripping off smalltalk since 1980. Ruby's cute but slow (you didn't invent functional languages, either), and your platform currently doesn't have a workable server (jruby/glassfish and passenger are the only ones that work passably).
Add to all that the willingness of Rails maintainers to do massive changes to the API in point releases (test-driven my ass).
Also, customers are catching on to the "you'll find better programmers at rails meetings" stuff. You should cut it out, because it not only creeps out customers who are savvy but it alienates your colleagues (who probably have something to teach you if you think the "better programmers" thing is true).
</rant>
Does NOT exist
Anyone who's ever worked in an org w/ full-time Oracle DBAs can attest to how fanatical they are in allegiance to Oracle, even to the point of ruin.
And it's funny, too, because you think they're interested in databases, relational concepts, data integrity, and all of this in general, but they're not, they interested in Oracle products, period. They'd quit before they managed a SQL Server or PostgreSQL database for you.
Cultists.
Off the top of my head I can think of quite a few groups that have a similar strong following including:
Slashdotters
social networking site addicts
vim/emacs wars
*nix in addition to Linux
FOSS
net neutrality
Wii
Xbox
KDE/gnome
Firefox
Halo
the chans
etc...
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
I stopped reading after this.
Though I suppose mentioning Guy Steele would have confused the Johnny-come-lately Java people.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Name: IBM
Established: 1896
Gathering of the Tribe: Share, Common
Major Deity: Herman Hollerith
Major Prophet: Tom Watson, Sr.
Sacred Relic: 80-column card
The Antichrist: Bill Gates
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
And 1 kill-ring to rule them all!
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
C'mon, the Commodore 8-bit machines had some enthusiasts but are nowhere nearly the in same league of cultism as the Amiga. And I should know, as an ex-Amiga cultist. That was a beautiful platform, and it was really hard to work with one and not get your mind warped with the belief that it could come back and start kicking asses. C64/C128 so-called "cultists" might get a little excited about some anachronistic development, decades after the platforms' prime, but I don't remember any religious fervor that the C64 was going to put Microsoft in its grave. For that you need an Amiga believer.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
They mention the Commodore fans, but not the Amiga fans. Newton Fans, but not the Apple Fanbois. That'd be like listing the World's religions and failing to mention Catholicism and Mormons.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Name: The Cult of Apple, Orthodox
Gathering of the Tribes: None since the diaspora
Major Deity: Steve Wozniak
Antichrist: Steve Jobs
Sacred Relics: The original Apple I, green screen monitors, the Disc II
Mantra: Apple II Forever
If you have an emotional attachment to any technology to the point that you vehemently attack its alternatives and passionately extol its superiority, be it a piece of metal and plastic or a collection of lines of source code, you seriously need to re-evaluate your life. Optimally, you need to end it.
"Quantity has a quality all its own." -- Joseph Stalin
Size matters. Within the topic of mysticism, when you get to the mainstream stuff like Christianity/Judaism/Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, they're not cults, regardless of any of the beliefs within them. Likewise, neither is Windows, for the same exact reason. You have to be a persecuted minority to be a cult. Being crazy isn't enough; if you have enough votes, insanity is irrelevant.
Apple is approaching loss of its culty flavor as well. Sure, they're still minority, but they're a big rich one, and certainly not persecuted (except maybe the gamers).
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Brief description of matlabite's commitments:
-Everything is a matrix of complex numbers
-World's complete mathematical knowledge is contained in matlab's help file
-If matlab cannot handle it, it's impossible to do
-There is no need to study numerical methods, it's enough to know matlab functions
-Everything, including databases should be managed through matlab, use of any other software is blasphemy
-Any IDE should be developed in Matlab so the infidels cannot access it
Proof - the WWNC link is from 2007. Wow. What a powerful group.
Dr Zoidberg: "Goose liver? Fish eggs? Where's the goose? Where's the eggs?"
'nuff said.
InfoWorld readers.
1. Early Newton owner :-)
2. long time Lisp developer (and I wrote 2 Spring-Verlag Lisp books, back in ancient history)
3. right now, Ruby is my favorite language
4. I am typing this on Ubuntu (installed on my MacBook)
100 comments and no mention of Linux as a cult, the big elephant in the room. Yes, it's a cult.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Those guys seem to think everything should be coded in C, even if it takes 10 times longer than coding it in another language, and results in a program filled with memory leaks.
C is great, but lets be honest - at least 80% of C programmers shouldn't be programming, let alone programming in a low level language!
I've seen more horribly malformed C than VB!
I am a high priest in the cult of BeOS, and I am frankly incensed that fine operating system was not included in the list.
I strongly suspect that Microsoft strong-armed the authors of the article to keep BeOS off the list, in order to maintain their monopoly.
Thank you.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Object-oriented programming. And yes, I expected to get done for heresy.
Brett
For anyone interesting in seeing the real thing check out www.ucadia.com and the Electronic Knowledge Architecture PS Ucadian's do not believe in foreign keys.
Those guys seem to think everything should be coded in $INTERPRETED_LANG, even if it takes 10 times longer to run it than in another language, and results in a program slowed by runtime type checking and garbage collection.
$INTERPRETED_LANG is great, but lets be honest - at least 80% of $INTERPRETED_LANG programmers shouldn't be programming, let alone programming in a high level language!
I've seen more horribly malformed $INTERPRETED_LANG than C!
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
Established: 1983
Gathering of the tribes: Brainshare
Major deity: Ray Noorda
Minor deities: Drew Major, Dale Neibaur, Kyle Powell, Mark Hurst
The Antichrist: Bill Gates
Tool of the downfall: TCP/IP? What's that?
Holy Relics: IPX/SPX
Most arcane incantation: dsrepair
Just saying, it should have been on the list at least.
not sure who to blame here, submitter or editor; article makes no mention of Power, just midrange.
if OOP was/is then it's being replaced with the Functional Programming cult and the main reason given is because of poor development skills of Windows developers surrounding multi-threading in Microsoft operating systems.
These kind of articles are silly. They are like chain letters just pollute the net. Infoworld should be ashamed for writing such utter waste. Whatever gets you traffic, eh? ScuttleMonkey probably works at infoworld.
No OS/2 shows an obvious lack of knowing the history of computer software and operating systems.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
are freaked out by amigans. "THOSE PEOPLE are craaaaaaaazy"
What does LISP have to do with Apple?
How many people actually read Doonesbury when the Newton was introduced? I don't think I've ever bothered to read an entire strip, and it's not like people stand around the "water cooler" talking about it (like, say Dilbert or Peanuts in their heyday). Yet every story I've ever read about the demise of the Newton references the Doonesbury strip series. If they're going to point out a cartoon, maybe they should reference the Simpsons "eat up Martha" reference. At least people other than tech writers would know what they are talking about.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
The cult of Pragmatism:
Name: Pragmatics
Established: Time Immemorial
Gathering of the Tribe: Anyplace shit has to work.
Major Deity: It Works
Sacred Relic: It Works
The Antichrist: Shit That Doesn't Fucking Work.
"Being crazy isn't enough; if you have enough votes, insanity is irrelevant."
True, but externalities have a way of really limiting such a parade of craziness. It could be a natural disaster, belief-caused famine, or an invasion of enemies - but eventually any insanity will be limited in scope.
Name: GNU Emacs
Established: 1983
Gathering of the Tribes: http://www.gnu.org
Major Deity: Richard M. Stallman
Sacred Relic: GNU Emacs Manual
Antichrists: Bill Joy, Bill Gates
Standing in awe at the historical wonder that is the Amiga, OS and hardware, is a natural human reaction, and therefore not the sign of belonging to any cult. The emotions that I've felt considering the Amiga are not unlike those I've experienced standing at the foot of the temple of Jupiter at Baalbek, or what I'd imagine would be the sensation of laying one's mortal eyes on the Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Actually, come to think of it, the Amiga was more Golden Pavilion than Baalbek: harmonious; perfect even in its flaws. So perfect, it should not exist on this flawed earth. A crazed monk burned the Temple of the Golden Pavilion -- that's cultism. There are folks who believe the AmigaOS will rise again to rule us all -- that's cultism. But admiring the sheer perfection of the Amiga as a computer system of its generation, and marveling at its unparalleled run as the most elegant and best-performing PC on the market? That's just appreciating historical reality.
Are there still people denying quantum mechanics?
Oh wait, it's about the kind of Apple that doesn't fall from trees.
**TODO** [X] Steal someone elses sig.
You forget the biggest cult of them all, the illuminati of the interwebs,
the bridge the trolls long to dwell under,
Name: Slashdot
Established: 1997
Gathering of the Tribe: slashdot.org
Major Deity: CowboyNeal
Major Prophet: CmdrTaco
Sacred Relic: 4digit Slashdot ID
The Antichrist: (Legion) Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Church of Scientology
~men are from earth. women are from earth. deal with it.~
They forgot so many. Cult of the PC-loving iPhoners, Cult of the PC-loving iPod Fans (if only these people would give apple a chance)..
Seriously, though: they left out way too many, and included too many archaic ones. Newtons and Palms? Really? Seems like propaganda to me. And the thing about Ubuntu is clearly a load of crap--anyone who's used Ubuntu can attest that it's dumbed down for us mere mortals.
Jobs, Gates, Jack Thompson. Oh... it said cults.
I would think that the cult of free software would have as its sacred document the definition of free software, not its implementation.
Similarly, its antistallman (right?) would be non-free software, not non-gpl software.
The antiperens of Debian would be the iPhone: functional and with lots of bling, but it locks you down and restricts your freedom to control your device(s). (Other Apple products may be a good antiperens candidate.)
The Biggest Cults In Tech
I stopped reading after this.
There are a couple things wrong with this statement. The overall sentiment however is that CLEARLY you are brainwashed thoroughly. Good luck with that. **sheep noises**
I'm also mystified as to why consoles were left out. When I was at school it was a clear cut Sega Megadrive vs. Super Nintendo cult war.
WHERE'S THE RESTAFARIANS????
I suppose it was appropriate that they didn't include Emacs in the list of cults, since it actually has its own church.
This sig wasn't worth reading, was it.
While this might go against the Church of the Anti-Religion (Gathering of the Tribe: here), maybe the fact that those of you who admit partisanship in yourself or among those who use the same technologies you do, could concede that systems of morality--including those which justify themselves on supernatural inspiration and use that to enhance its effect (indisputably quite frequently for good), while admittedly broader in scope (and power) than technology fan-clubs, are not themselves inherently to blame for fanatics and fundamentalists any more than Linux or the like is inherently to blame for the type of dude who kicked me out of a chat room for the FUD blasphemy of joking to the effect that if I couldn't get help from them testing a potentially useful open source Firefox extension on Linux that Linux users might otherwise cede territory to the "Dark Side".
It shouldn't be such a marvel to people who recognize that our ubiquitous use of a brain--however much you may joke that religionists do not have any (isn't treating and taunting others as a whole a sign of fervid attachment and insecurity, btw?; most cults don't even go that far)--in filtering reality, with its propensity for emotional and/or communal attachments, will apply such a propensity, more or less universally, for good or ill, across all subjects. I am in you, and you are in me...
For some reason I kept reading "cult" with an "n"
The Church banned and actively suppressed most vernacular translations of the Bible in the early Middle Ages in an attempt to stamp out the heresies that would inevitably arise when people could understand what the Bible actually said. (The concepts of the Trinity and of absolution by grace have been consistent heresy generators.) Keeping the Bible in Latin severely limited the "open and free exchange" of its contents. I agree with you that learning Latin is no "secret knowledge" initiation, but you go too far when you say that the Church has been entirely open with its core text.
: useless
dup swap drop ;
No sig? Sigh...
I think you'll find being us Apple maniacs are not part of a cult - it's a bonified religion. We even have our own celebrity center! Heck - Tom cruise is even an apple maniac. Beat that, non-believers.
The Apple camp is not only a cult, but it's the Scientology of tech cults.
Which reminds me...
"Mammon slept. And the beast reborn spread over the earth and its numbers grew legion. And they proclaimed the times and sacrificed crops unto the fire, with the cunning of foxes. And they built a new world in their own image as promised by the sacred words, and spoke of the beast with their children. Mammon awoke, and lo! it was naught but a follower." --from The Book of Mozilla, 11:9 (10th Edition)
>> Although I think it's pretty clear that the Apple camp isn't an opinionated cult, they're just always right.
s/l/n
The cults aren't the problem, it's the fad diets... e.g. Ruby on Rails.
I stopped reading after this.
I stopped reading after that page. As a serious Ruby programmer, I don't recognise much in that description. I've certainly never heard of MINSWAN. I thought DRY was the main credo of the Ruby community. (Or is that the Rails community? I'm not cultish enough to tell them apart.)
- Linux clearly isn't a cult.
The Church of Emacs and the Cult of Vi might not be two of the biggest, but must be two of the most interesting groups out there.
All hail the Editor of The Beast.