If Programming Languages Were Religions 844
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.
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.
Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Like how you ignored the part about Fundamentalist Christians burning people at the stake.
Visual Basic (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:If C++ is Islam (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:wow (Score:4, Insightful)
He didn't accuse Islam of murderous tendencies, he asked that if you were a muslim that you not kill him.
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. If you're a moderate muslim and you find that offensive, then you need to do two things: get over it, since free speech is a right in the U.S.A. and therefore you're likely to find offensive speech living here, or on the internet; secondly, you should be decrying the violence promulgated by extremist muslims in the name of Islam. Part of the problem with moderate religionists is that they give cover for the extremists under the umbrella of "respect for religion". If they want their religion to continue getting respect, they need to police their own.
BASIC (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What, no scientology? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Are religion (Score:5, Insightful)
More to the point, religions are programming languages.
MUMPS (Score:2, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS [wikipedia.org]
I object on the Judaism comparison. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:wow (Score:4, Insightful)
If they want their religion to continue getting respect, they need to police their own.
Er, how? The moderates usually have no authority over the extremists, so how should they police them? In what sense are the extremists the moderates' "own"? Your logic is like saying that I am responsible for the murder and torture of Baby P [timesonline.co.uk] because as a British subject I am responsible for policing my own. Just how might I have done that?
Re:Atheism (Score:5, Insightful)
Atheism - There is no computer ...
Agnosticism - You cannot prove there is a computer by programming ...
Re:hmmm. What about assembler and ADA? (Score:2, Insightful)
ADA is for the Christian Crusaders
Assembler is used by the Angels
VHDL is used by God
Hinduism and Erlang??? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:wow (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:I wish programming was a religion (Score:1, Insightful)
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! :-)
Re:Programming Languages aren't Religions... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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'?
Re:wow (Score:2, Insightful)
Part of the problem with moderate religionists is that they give cover for the extremists under the umbrella of "respect for religion". If they want their religion to continue getting respect, they need to police their own.
Ah yes, so as Christians we were supposed to have policed the following:
- Christians who think the crusade massacres were a good idea (massacre)
- fundamentalists who go around shooting abortion doctors (murder)
- the protestant catholic fighting in Ireland (terrorism)
- the Salem and other witch trials (murder)
- the 500 years of the dark ages when Christianity ruled over science and anyone questioning the authority of the church was killed (murder/massacre)
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.
Re:wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Ludicrous
By that logic the attacks on Iraqi Christians by Islamic fundamentalists are justified, because they are at war with the (supposedly) Christian US.
Also, countries with conflicts with ethnic minorities are justified in treating all members of a minority as enemies because some have taken arms against the state?
The good bit is that we can now hold all Americans responsible for George Bush's actions.....
Re:wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Eifel (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:What do you mean if? (Score:5, Insightful)
No. There certainly are endless ways of writing truly atrocious code.
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.
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.
what the fuck are you talking about? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:I beg to differ (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Not so, by my logic, attacks on Iraqi Christians would happen. I made no claims as to the moral justification of such attacks.
Policing your own is merely the best way to both show that you repudiate the actions of your extremists and prevent them from dragging you into a war only they want. In the case of Islam it turns the war from Islam versus everyone else into extremists versus moderates. This might not sound good for Islam, but I'm pretty sure that the extremists are not as numerous, well armed, or funded as "the rest of the world".
My analysis isn't about what's right or wrong, it's about what the consequences are likely to be.
Convergent Evolution? (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:Slashdotted? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Utter tosh.
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.
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".
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.
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.
Re:wow (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but I think you're quite wrong here.
First of all: For most religious people their belief is more than just the guys at the top. It's not like your average soccerclub/politcal party, where you "just leave" if you can't stand one of the club's execs.
Religion is a whole beliefsystem, leaving your church behind basically means saying: "Well, Mr. Pope - I really don't like the way you treat XY, that's why I won't believe in your god anymore." From a religious point of view that's utterly stupid. While I do appreciate your view as being pretty sensible, I don't think you quite understood how religous people tick.
That said, there are quite some religions that make quitting pretty hard. There have been some cases where people who tried to leave the Islam behind were murdered by extremists because of that.
Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
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. [wikipedia.org]
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 [wikipedia.org] 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.
Re:Atheism... (Score:5, Insightful)
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;
Ever heard of tacit approval? (Score:4, Insightful)
But by not denouncing the act (or denouncing it with a "but") they are supporting it. Tacit approval, look it up.
Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
> I'm a Christian ... and am used to getting a bit of a slapping from
> ignorami spouting bigoted claptrap only lightly based on truth
Hey now, the clergy are only doing their jobs.
Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, that factual part of history offends me greatly, too.
Re:wow (Score:3, Insightful)
The same argument could be made about most Americans who consider themselves to be Christians, by the more orthodox Christians of the world.
The Bible has enough rules and guidelines in it to define an entire culture and way of life... but all Christians pick and choose... even the most strict Christian is unable to follow all those rules.
So I'd say the Muslims you are considering "not actually Muslim" are as much Muslim as most Christians are Christian.
Re:I beg to differ (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:What do you mean if? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:wow (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll take a stab at it.
FORTRAN is atheism. FORTRAN has tried to get OOP and dynamic memory religion in recent incarnations, but people still prefer FORTRAN 77. And get burned at the stake for it.
PL/1 is Norse mythology. Heavy, thunderous, gigantic, and dead. Put on Wagner's Twilight of the Gods the next time you feel like programming in PL/1.
Pascal is Confucianism. It was all about education until used for real.
Assembler is Druidism. Assembler programmers worship the bare metal, druids worship Nature, and everyone worships differently.
The only one I found really amusing was Perl = Voodoo. Now, what language fits Cargo Cult?
Re:wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, I've never read Dawkins, although I'm familiar with what is generally said about his views, and aware that they are probably fairly similar to my own.
I do lack absolute proof in a lack of a god/gods, however there's nothing wrong with that, because I lack absolute proof of everything (you can't ever really KNOW, just weigh the evidence at hand and come to conclusions). However, when it comes to god(s), not only do I lack absolute proof of them, but I also lack ANY compelling evidence for them, OR any evidence that anyone else might have evidence for them. Therefore, I can only come to the conclusion that these people have an equal or lesser amount of information regarding god(s), and yet on this information, somehow have managed to come to a belief. This looks not very different to a mental illness that I suffered as a child where I had difficulty distinguishing between fantasy and reality.
It's also worth pointing out that no, I DON'T think most of the world is mentally ill, because in my opinion, most people who claim to believe in a god/gods do not actually. They "hope" and "would like to believe", and in many cases will go through the motions "just in case", but they don't really believe. I think this basically when anyone talks about faith as an argument to a lack of evidence. I do not think "faith" itself is truly strong enough to ever really cause a belief, but it IS strong enough to cause one to act on it with similar results to belief.
To give an example of this: I BELIEVE I am sitting in my apartment right now. I BELIEVE there is a country called Canada. I BELIEVE that my wallet contains 475 euro in notes (I just counted it). These are all beliefs, and to discover I was wrong about any of these would be quite a shock - I would have to re-think a lot of things I assume about the world/universe.
I HAVE FAITH that I will not be fired from my job today. I will go to work, do my job, and fully expect to go back again tomorrow. It would also be quite a shock to be fired, as, as far as I know, I am considered to be an excellent employee, there is no reason for me to be fired and under the laws of the country I live in they can't fire me without a good reason. But, I am aware it is possible, and it would not require that I re-think anything I assume about the world/universe around me.
Re:wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Civilized people have long since thrown out the idea of "collective" responsibility for crimes. If an extremist commits a crime, the extremist is fault. It is then the responsibility of the state do something about it, not fellow adherents of the religion. In fact, in many cases moderates are VICTIMS of the extremism, either directly or indirectly.
You should not judge a person on the basis of OTHER peoples' actions. At best it is lazy thinking; at worst it is racist stereotyping.