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If Programming Languages Were Religions
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Dec 17, 2008 08:47 AM
from the worship-his-noodliness dept.
from the worship-his-noodliness dept.
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.
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What do you mean if? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What do you mean if? (Score:5, Insightful)
No. There certainly are endless ways of writing truly atrocious code.
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Re:What do you mean if? (Score:5, Funny)
But few ways so actively promoted by the language.
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wow (Score:5, Insightful)
amazing how offense free that is. that had to take a bit of effort.
Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Except for the part about only accusing Islam of murderous tendencies?
It's sad that only biases which disagree with our own internal ones are noticed.
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Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Like how you ignored the part about Fundamentalist Christians burning people at the stake.
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Re:wow (Score:5, Funny)
If two anonymous posters speak to one another, does anybody hear them? ;-)
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Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Ya but he mentioned nothing of the chance of rape at the hands of fundamentalist christians.
Since catholic priests love the rape, or so the media coverage would tell us.
How much video footage of muslims sitting at home reading the paper are you shown? there's a billion of them out there but all you ever see is are the rabble rousers and nutcases.
Imagine if all they ever saw of america on their TV shows was Westboro Baptist Church protests,KKK protests and rednecks talking about how they'd love to shoot all dem damn muslums and George Bush. They might decide that Americans were all violent fundamentalist nutcases. And they'd be exactly as right as you are.
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Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Like it or not, Muslims are more likely to kill in response to perceived offenses against their religion, and his post makes light of that fact.
It's not really intrinsic to Islam. It just happens that the surrounding culture of the area most strongly associated with Islam is more likely to kill over any sort of slight. Muslims who grew up in other surrounding cultures are MUCH more moderate as a whole. My personal experience is that Muslims who grew up in western culture are much LESS likely to attempt to impose their religious beliefs on others than fundamentalist Christians are.
AS for 'policing their own', what in the world is an American Muslim family supposed to do about the Taliban? Bombard them with greeting cards from the 'lighten up collection'?
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Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a difficult question to answer, but it's one that the moderates are going to have to figure out. Any group that can't police their own extremists will, sooner or later, find themselves dragged into a war with everyone else. That's the nature of fanatical extremism, they want a war. And if they try hard enough, eventually they're going to get one.
As for Baby P, I assume the people responsible are headed to trial for their crimes? Thus Britain is policing it's own even though the example you chose isn't even roughly the same situation.
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Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
An interesting question, but largely irrelevant as long as the extremists claim they are a part of the group, and that claim is not obviously and meaningfully repudiated. Remember, no group is ever perfectly homogeneous, so every group has factions within it. It will usually be difficult for people external to a group to accurately identify faction members within that group. And if it's difficult, many people won't make the effort to do it.
In the particular case of Islam, efforts to curtail the extremists seems to often be conflated by people in the larger, more moderate group, as an attack on that larger group. And the actions of the extremists often seem to have some level of approval from the moderate group's leaders. Thus leading me to the obvious conclusion that both moderate Muslims and extremist Muslims share a common group. I suspect this is a view shared (rightly or wrongly) by the majority of non-Muslims.
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Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Leave the group.
If the organization or group you are in is being lead in a direction you are opposed to and you have no say in that course, then you should leave. To stay is to explicitly condone the actions of the leadership. The best contemporary example of this in the context of religious groups is in fact the "Mormon" Church of Latter Day Saints, which has seen many followers leave [news10.net] because of the way in which it conducted itself during the Proposition 8 vote.
Here was a church leadership which injected its organization voluminously and inappropriately into a contemporary political issue. They turned an institution of private religious belief into public political party. Their church is now feeling the backlash from this, and attempting to take off their political cap as quickly as they put it on is simply not possible.
By staying in their church, Mormons explicitly endorse their churches actions and stances. Ostensibly on the issue of gay marriage, but more importantly on the long term decision that the LDS church can and will inject itself and its considerable demographic and monetary clout directly and voluminously into any political debate that takes its fancy. Many european states, learning from experience, outrightly ban such behavior, but in the US, obviously things are different.
You can stay and support the actions of your church leaders, or you can leave. There are other sects, and other interpretations. The same goes for Muslims, particularly those in western countries, who frequent mosques with radical imams. Protestants break off and form new churches all the time [nytimes.com]. Even catholics can pick other pulpits if they take exception to their current priest. Staying to avoid social difficulty, or pretending that your presence is not being used to support your church leader's views and actions, are not valid excuses. Staying to "change from within" is only valid if you are actively doing so, otherwise it too is an excuse.
People can and should leave a church if that church's actions or beliefs go against their own principles. To stay is to abandon those principles.
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Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Utter tosh.
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I beg to differ (Score:5, Informative)
I was right with you up till that.
Religion (and yeah, any other non-rational shared belief system, like football (aka "soccer")) is a key component of most episodes of large scale violence. It's hard to get people to do things that are liable to get them hurt or killed, or lead them to hurt or kill others. Their natural reaction will be to think "But wait, what if somebody gets hurt?"
This is where all having the same imaginary friend comes in. If you can get people worked up by some non-falsifiable hogwash you can whip up a mod that will believe and do anything. Getting people to do stupid things is much easier if you shut their brains down first.
The great thing about imaginary friends for this sort of thing is that they can't contradict you. If you use a living celebrity ("Come on, people, let's kill him for Oprah's sake!") there's always the risk your Chosen One will step up and say "WTF are you thinking?"
There's a reason it's so easy to associate specific religions with specific stupid bloodthirsty acts, and that's that they were causal in the perpetration of those acts..
--MarkusQ
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Re:I beg to differ (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I beg to differ (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:I beg to differ (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Out of your examples, the only one related to modern Christianity was about the abortion doctor murderers, and they are loudly and publicly condemned by all but a few nutcases. Honestly, you'd be hard pressed to collect a worse set of evidence for your hypothesis.
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Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Absofreakinlutely. The only reason religion gets brought up in regards to Northern Ireland is that one side happens to be Catholic and the other side happens to be Protestant. There isn't any thing religious about the conflict at all apart from that. If they were all one or the other the Irish would still be pissed (angry) about British occupation, rule, whatever you want to call it. It would be really nice to call it what it is and stop calling it a religious conflict.
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Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Note in advance: I think ALL people that truly believe in a religion have a mental illness. This is regardless of what the religion is, but I do have a particular distaste for the Abrahamic religions, as they seem to espouse the most hatred in their religious texts.
Now, that is a pretty horrible quote from the Qu'ran, but there are equally as horrible ones from the Christian texts, and indeed very horrible ones in texts that are shared by pretty much all of the Abrahamic religions.
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Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
There are at least a half-dozen quotes in the bible saying that unbelievers should be killed, and a bunch more saying that people who perform certain actions (which aren't unethical from a secular perspective) should be killed. And of course, there's "be not yoked with unbelievers".
It's not a Quran-specific thing. All the Abrahamic religions have no respect whatsoever for those outside of the religion. The mentality boils down to nothing more than "hate everyone who's not one of us".
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Re:wow (Score:5, Funny)
I personally found offensive that he compared C++ to Islam. C++ is much more peaceful.
You think so?
Try publishing some cartoons of Bjarne Stroustrup, then we'll see how peaceful it is!
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Re:wow (Score:5, Funny)
2. Insult programmers.
3. ????
4. Prophet!
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Re:wow (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:wow (Score:5, Funny)
Visual Basic would be Satanism - Except that you don't REALLY need to sell your soul to be a Satanist...
Speaking as the dark lord of hell, I'm offended by the insinuation that I want to possess the souls of VB "programmers"!
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Re:wow (Score:5, Informative)
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If C++ is Islam (Score:5, Funny)
Then Linus must have joined Salman Rushdie in hiding after this rant:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/57643/focus=57918 [gmane.org]
I'm Atheist I suppose. (Score:5, Interesting)
Objective-C isn't in the list. And that makes me happy.
Re:I'm Atheist I suppose. (Score:5, Funny)
objc is a heretic cult and will be quashed.
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LOLCode (Score:5, Funny)
LOLCODE would be Pastafarianism - An esoteric, Internet-born belief that nobody really takes seriously, despite all the efforts to develop and spread it.
WHAT??? What do you mean no one takes Pastafarianism seriously?? Die, infidel!
Re:LOLCode (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:LOLCode (Score:5, Funny)
WHAT??? What do you mean no one takes Pastafarianism seriously?? Die, infidel!
If you disbelief in the deities you're an atheist, if you disbelieve in Pastafarianism does that make you antepasta? And if so, what would be a good wine to match with you?
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Dual religion is accepted? (Score:5, Funny)
I am the incarnated paradox
Re:Dual religion is accepted? (Score:5, Funny)
I am a fundamentalist crhistian (java) AND a satanist (visual basic)? LOL!
I am the incarnated paradox :)
How so?
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Re:Dual religion is accepted? (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, you are what many experienced programmers refer to as "A Terrorist".
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Theologians will disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
IMHO,
Re:Theologians will disagree (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
I wish programming was a religion (Score:5, Funny)
Then we could excommunicate people for breaking coding conventions and burn them at the stake for buffer overflows. Of course, this would also mean we'd need altars to Gates and Torvalds in the server room, would have to burn the right incenses and make appropriate obeisances to ward off crashes. Of course, when the crashes happen anyway, we could then have the debate over whether the religion was false or if we simply weren't observing it strictly enough and decide to throw a virgin off the roof and see if things improve. (cue jokes about the likeliest department to find virgins in.) You know, it would be kind of cool to have a giant computing pyramid atop which is the altar we tear out the beating hearts of living sacrifices.
Re:I wish programming was a religion (Score:5, Funny)
The 10 commandments of coding conventions
1) Thou shalt not place the Left Curly Brace on a line of its own; this shows disrespect to thy Fathers and thy Mothers who only had 80 columns and 24 lines in days of old
2) Thou shalt not use the GoTo, for such disrespects the Prophet of Programming Dijkstra,
3) Thou shalt comment thy code, and provide great detail about the workings of thy mind when thou does first write thy method. And thou shalt revisit and revise thy comments only in the earliest hours of the morning prior to thy code review.
4) Honor thy Sun and thy Java that your days may be long upon the Virtual Machine where thy code livith.
5) Thou shalt Compile before checking in.
6) Thou shalt Run thy code at least once before shipping.
7) Thou shalt Test at least one Browser against thy Server's code, and thy backup Server's code, and thy Neighbor's Server's code.
8) Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's operating system unless thy neighbor runs Linux; If ye cast your eye upon thy neighbor's Windows Server, and covet it in thy heart, thy staff shall take thee into thy parking lot and stone thee with mice until the demon of stupidity leaveth thee
9) Thou shalt not make libraries of other gods such as C# or Perl. These are an abomination before thy God.
10) Once thou hast compiled thy code, generated thy Java Doc, Reviewed thy code with the elders of thy people, Deployed thy code upon thy server, and tested thy code upon the Browser of thy God (Firefox 3.0), and thy customer doth stumble upon thy bug, thou shalt blame thy customer with thy mouth, and curse his existence, for thou hath commented, placed thy braces properly, indented with four spaces (and not eight as do the godless), hath capped thy constants, hath lowercased thy methods, and hath passed all thy JUnit tests..... It is the truth of God that if yee hath done all these things, thy customer must be at fault.
Parent
Re:I wish programming was a religion (Score:5, Funny)
I guess I must have my own cult cause if you follow command 1 I will personally burn you at the stake.
Thou wilst follow thy K&R style guide or be beaten to death with dangling pointers. Always remember to cuddle your else clauses, they get lonely easily.
Parent
BASIC (Score:5, Insightful)
Prolog must be Soviet Russia style communism. (Score:5, Funny)
Slight Tangent (Score:5, Funny)
Confucianism: Confucius say, "Shit happens."
Buddhism: If shit happens, it isn't really shit.
Zen Buddhism: Shit is, and is not.
Zen Buddhism #2: What is the sound of shit happening?
Hinduism: This shit has happened before.
Islam: If shit happens, it is the will of Allah.
Islam #2: If shit happens, kill the person responsible.
Islam #3: If shit happens, blame Israel.
Catholicism: If shit happens, you deserve it.
Protestantism: Let shit happen to someone else.
Presbyterian: This shit was bound to happen.
Episcopalian: It's not so bad if shit happens, as long as you serve the right wine with it.
Methodist: It's not so bad if shit happens, as long as you serve grape juice with it.
Congregationalist: Shit that happens to one person is just as good as shit that happens to another.
Unitarian: Shit that happens to one person is just as bad as shit that happens to another.
Lutheran: If shit happens, don't talk about it.
Fundamentalism: If shit happens, you will go to hell, unless you are born again. (Amen!)
Fundamentalism #2: If shit happens to a televangelist, it's okay.
Fundamentalism #3: Shit must be born again.
Judaism: Why does this shit always happen to us?
Calvinism: Shit happens because you don't work.
Seventh Day Adventism: No shit shall happen on Saturday.
Creationism: God made all shit.
Secular Humanism: Shit evolves.
Christian Science: When shit happens, don't call a doctor - pray!
Christian Science #2: Shit happening is all in your mind.
Unitarianism: Come let us reason together about this shit.
Quakers: Let us not fight over this shit.
Utopianism: This shit does not stink.
Capitalism: That's MY shit.
Communism: It's everybody's shit.
Feminism: Men are shit.
Chauvinism: We may be shit, but you can't live without us...
Commercialism: Let's package this shit.
Impressionism: From a distance, shit looks like a garden.
Idolism: Let's bronze this shit.
Existentialism: Shit doesn't happen; shit IS.
Existentialism #2: What is shit, anyway?
Stoicism: This shit is good for me.
Hedonism: There is nothing like a good shit happening!
Mormonism: God sent us this shit.
Mormonism #2: This shit is going to happen again.
Wiccan: An it harm none, let shit happen.
Scientology: If shit happens, see "Dianetics", p.157.
Jehovah's Witnesses: Knock Knock Shit happens.
Jehovah's Witnesses #2: May we have a moment of your time to show you some of our shit?
Jehovah's Witnesses #3: Shit has been prophesied and is imminent; only the righteous shall survive its happening.
Moonies: Only really happy shit happens.
Hare Krishna: Shit happens, rama rama.
Rastafarianism: Let's smoke this shit!
Zoroastrianism: Shit happens half on the time.
Church of SubGenius: BoB shits.
Practical: Deal with shit one day at a time.
Agnostic: Shit might have happened; then again, maybe not.
Agnostic #2: Did someone shit?
Agnostic #3: What is this shit?
Satanism: SNEPPAH TIHS.
Atheism: What shit?
Atheism #2: I can't believe this shit!
Nihilism: No shit.
Converting into Judaism (Score:5, Informative)
The article's author says about Judaism:
This isn't true, however. You can convert into Judaism, we just purposefully make it difficult to do so. The custom is that you need to turn the person away 3 times. Only after they come back after the third turn-away can they begin the process to convert. This helps ensure that people don't take conversion to Judaism lightly. The conversion itself is mainly classes to get up to speed on the religious laws and then a dunk in a mikvah (a kind of ritual pool). Males have an extra obstacle - circumcision. And don't think that hospital-administered one will get you out of it. In the case of an already circumcised male convert, a drop of blood is still taken (as a sort of token religious circumcision). The end result is that converts are actually more likely to be religious than natural-born Jews and aren't likely to convert away from Judaism on a whim.
Re:If Programming Languages Were Religions? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:If Programming Languages Were Religions? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:If Programming Languages Were Religions? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Are religion (Score:5, Insightful)
More to the point, religions are programming languages.
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Re:Atheism (Score:5, Insightful)
Atheism - There is no computer ...
Agnosticism - You cannot prove there is a computer by programming ...
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Re:Programming Languages aren't Religions... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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