Religious and spiritual folklore surrounding programming

150 点作者 Decabytes超过 2 年前

24 条评论

raphlinus超过 2 年前

A lot of the cultural phenomena around Rust can best be explained in religious terms. It's no accident that we are sometimes referred to as the "Rust Evangelism Strike Force," and the word "zealot" is frequently used, of course largely by critics.There's a deeper level as well. The concept of "memory safety" which is a core principle of Rust has, I believe, a lot in common with religious concepts of purity and cleanliness. Undefined behavior, by contrast, is an undesirable form of uncleanliness, emotionally similar to trayf in Jewish culture or haram in Muslim culture. Rituals include the `#[deny(unsafe_code)]` incantation, or using cargo-deny or similar tools to make sure uncleanliness hasn't crept in through dependencies.It's not just Rust, although that's a nexus for a lot of tension and conflict around this issue. Tools for avoiding and mitigating unsafety are often given names evoking cleanliness: "Purify" and "sanitizers."

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LanternLight83超过 2 年前

I've only got a second, but feel the need to highlight the Technical Interview series[1] and the many fan-works that pay homage to it. I enjoyed the anthropomorphising of a Package Manager Murder Mystery[2], and the creative writing of Common Tech Jobs Described as Cabals of Mesoamerican Wizards[3].1: <a href="https://aphyr.com/tags/interviews" rel="nofollow">https://aphyr.com/tags/interviews</a> 2: <a href="https://artemis.sh/2022/04/11/package-manager-murder-mystery.html" rel="nofollow">https://artemis.sh/2022/04/11/package-manager-murder-mystery...</a> 3. <a href="https://etiennefd.substack.com/p/common-tech-jobs-described-as-cabals" rel="nofollow">https://etiennefd.substack.com/p/common-tech-jobs-described-...</a>

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djedr超过 2 年前

The article mentions SICP aka the wizard book. In it, there are a lot of metaphors pertaining to magic and spirits, which IMO makes the book much better than if they weren't there. One of the authors of the book, Hal Abelson, famously said:> There's a good part of Computer Science that's like magic. Unfortunately there's a bad part of Computer Science that's like religion.This points to perhaps a useful distinction that is to be made here between religion (as in tribalism which leads to holy wars) and mysticism/spirituality/magic (as in deep fascination in search of ultimate truth).

stared超过 2 年前

It reminds me of "If Programming Languages were Religions" (2008), <a href="http://kokizzu.blogspot.com/2015/02/if-programming-languages-were-religions.html" rel="nofollow">http://kokizzu.blogspot.com/2015/02/if-programming-languages...</a>I think it deserves and update - 15 years is quite some time.

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slavik81超过 2 年前

> Not everyone agrees to who belongs in the pantheon, but for them there are fictional hackers, like MelMel wasn't fictional. Melvin Kaye was an application programmer at Librascope, and there's a photo of him in the company newsletter. <a href="https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/macho-programmers-drum-memory-and-a-forensic-analysis-of-1960s-machine-code-6c5da6a40244/" rel="nofollow">https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/macho-programmers-drum-mem...</a>

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dale_glass超过 2 年前

One weird thing I noticed over time is the enshrinement of old and crappy technologies, in the face of all reason. Some examples:Some people for some reason I can't understand have warm and fuzzy feelings about FTP, despite it being a horrible protocol in multiple ways. Yet, for a long time it was often thought of being the "proper" way to download stuff, even though even HTTP is technically better in many respects.You still find plenty people harping on about the Unix Philosophy, even though that in modern times it's nigh irrelevant, and significant parts of it are technically obsolete. Yeah, parsing text streams was sorta okay in the 80s, but is very troublesome and brittle in the modern age.And there's an odd amount of people who are still mentally stuck on the Linux of the 90s and having trouble to understand that things have gotten more complicated since then, and software has had to adapt to things like laptops and wifi.

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gumby超过 2 年前

In terms of the fetishization of ancient relics: In the photo of RMS, his "halo" is a disk platter (looks like an RP06 platter but likely was from some "winchester" drive of the 80s). The diameter is about 360 mm (14 metric inches), because the entire drive was 19 inches wide to go into a rack.Those large drives could store an enormous amount of data: sometimes as much as a megabyte per platter!

joeman1000超过 2 年前

Great post, but I don't think the author really knows what 'flamer' means when he uses it to describe Linus Torvalds

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ArtWomb超过 2 年前

I use Deities & Demigods for hostnames, and create John Bunyan-esque Pilgrim's Progress maps for VPC config. No downsides to being a medievalist in '23 ;)

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sovietswag超过 2 年前

Very endearing post :). I’m keeping a collection of computing holy wars that I come across if anyone wants to check it out: <a href="https://josh8.com/blog/wars_of_computing.html" rel="nofollow">https://josh8.com/blog/wars_of_computing.html</a>I’ll add a footnote to this post, it captures the spirit well.If anyone has suggestions for things to add to my list it’d be much appreciated

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simulo超过 2 年前

Related academic publication: "Worship, Faith, and Evangelism: Religion as an Ideological Lens for Engineering Worlds", Ames, Rosner, Erickson,2015"...a common ideological framework that appears across four engineering endeavors: the OLPC Project, the National Day of Civic Hacking, the Fixit Clinic, and the Stanford d.school."

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teddyh超过 2 年前

> websites like The Tao Of ProgrammingThe Tao of Programming is not a website. It’s a book. If you saw the whole thing on a web site, that was an illegal copy. Of course, it was also most certainly missing the illustrations, foreword, etc.

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anthk超过 2 年前

Zork and the learning what do game "spells" do on objects (and specially with Spiritwrak) are obviously related to the process on learning arcane/obscure commnds and their arguments.Pre-infocom Zork I-II-III's ambient (Dungeon) was obviously related to the MIT and its rooms. In Adventure, you explored the Mamooth Cave. With Zork, you learn about the "mystical place" of programmers with weird spells, magical-techy places (heck, Zork is anachonistic) and figuring out the mechanics by yourself as hackers do.

082349872349872超过 2 年前

What sort of religious/spiritual folklore could we come up with?Turing meeting his end with the apple is an obvious one, but I'd rather imagine that, for having brought computing to the mortals, he's chained to a rock in perpetuity, when he attempts to port DOOM to the ACE, only to be foiled each evening when the moths show up and immolate themselves, destroying various valves, requiring him to start afresh each morning...Shannon came down from the mountain and gave us sequences* of symbols; various later prophets (McCarthy, Crockford, etc.) have added new structures on top but it's difficult to go very wrong if one hews to the mitzvot of the old ways: after all, string homomorphisms stream.(Rabin & Scott introduced monotapism in <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34561797" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34561797</a> ; polytapists suffer [both in this world and any possible successor] by losing the grace of Boolean closure, for ever and ever. Amen)Very near the Western Wall is a mosque whose wall contains the parallel port where Englebart (peace be upon him) plugged in the divine Mouse.Every generation rediscovers Confucian Rectification of Names for themselves; that's why we have so many names for the same things in Informatics. (cue <a href="https://xkcd.com/927/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/927/</a> )When Siddhārtha Gautama left the palace for the first time in his life, he encountered legacy code, bit rot, abandonware, and an Agda programmer. Shocked at the rampant suffering in software, he started his noble quest to free software...* Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht, alles andere ist Menschenwerk. — LK

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wheelerof4te超过 2 年前

Much of it has been reduced to memeing on the Internet using crude or overused jokes.It all has it's place when compared to the bland seriousness of real work.

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praptak超过 2 年前

My closest to religious experience was a C program crashing after removing an unused variable. I repeated this and tested multiple times by adding and removing the variable and running the program.Now I obviously have a believable rational hypothesis for that behaviour but then it was mystical. I left the variable and got a passing grade (it was a student program).

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yazzku超过 2 年前

> You've been visited by St. Ignucious. Upvote for success in FOSSSt. Ignucious would not use the term 'FOSS': <a href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html</a>

Quarrelsome超过 2 年前

Somewhat off-topic question: if I wanted to try to re-interpret assembly as a religion (i.e. knowledge left for us by our creator as opposed to a programming language for a technology we understand); which book about assembly would be most appropriate to choose as the core holy text?

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_gabe_超过 2 年前

I love how in the link to the Linus Torvalds flamed rebuttal about Minix, one of the arguments they were having was whether a micro-kernel or monolithic kernel was better... This was in 1992! It's funny how some things never change :)

labrador超过 2 年前

Terry Davis and Temple OS. God communicated to him through the random number generator.This article is meant to be humorous, but I think it unintentionally hit on some important truths.Terry Davis Was RightReligion Is Computing, Computing Is ReligionTerry’s big idea was that it is not possible to separate religion from computing.Since the beginning, every complex society has been based on a shared socio-cognitive operating system, a religion. Your religion says you must live a certain way. It tells you what is valuable and what is disgusting. It gives you your fundamental paradigm and ontology of belief through which you interpret the world. It tells you to read certain texts, listen to certain traditions of wise men, and meet with like-minded others at certain places and times. It tells you to avoid certain influences, and seek out others. It gives you techniques for structuring thought and mind and memory. When you have doubts, it gives you procedures to ask for and receive insight. It tells you who you are, and what your life is for.<a href="https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/04/01/palladium-is-now-templeos/" rel="nofollow">https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/04/01/palladium-is-now-tem...</a>I'm researching these ideas more since ChatGPT has shown me how to make certain religious and spiritual ideas more accessible.Levandowski shut down his AI church after he got in trouble with the law for something unrelated. He was too soon, so it's only a matter of time one starts up again.<a href="https://www.wired.com/story/anthony-levandowski-artificial-intelligence-religion" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/story/anthony-levandowski-artificial-i...</a>Bonus link: Terrance McKenna. Culture is your operating system<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c8an2XZ3MU">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c8an2XZ3MU</a>

LAC-Tech超过 2 年前

Idolatry might be an interesting, if contentious path to explore! (your computing idols of course. yours are all false prophets mine are all legit)

smitty1e超过 2 年前

Everything about code is deterministic and material.Actual faith is orthogonal to all of the data and the logic.Sacrifice not humanity on the altar of technology.

the_af超过 2 年前

I hate to be a kill joy, but none of these are true examples of religion or mysticism. They are at best playful examples of hacker culture, and at worst examples of arguments with opinions "strongly held"; i.e. flamewars. "Religious wars" in tech is not to be taken literally, nobody thinks these are spiritual in nature; it's an analogy to the fury of real world religious wars.The Tao of Programming takes the trappings of Taoism but is not to be taken seriously as a religious or spiritual text.When someone says a programming book is "the Bible of X" this is no more religious than when videogame creators refer to their documents collecting their fantasy world data as "their bible", as in "the Fallout bible". This is just borrowing the popular image of the Bible as the "authority" on something. It's common usage, not religious.TempleOS is an outlier, and not a good example. Its author is arguably mentally ill. If I remember correctly he is also a bigot, and nobody would claim bigotry is an essential part of working with computers.It's not true that most hackers are Buddhists, where's the evidence for that?Folklore.org is about anecdotes about early Apple (I wouldn't discount some have religion as the background because I haven't read them all, but I can attest the vast majority are non spiritual in nature, and instead about nerds, tech and infighting). They are fascinating because Apple is a major player and its early history is full of quirky anecdotes. It's not folklore in the sense of gnomes and ghosts.Stallman is an atheist; his "saintly" photo is a joke.And so on, and so on. I know the author of TFA knows all this; I bet most readers of HN also do. So why am I such a bore?Because someone will take this literally.

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coretx超过 2 年前

<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS</a>