Larry Wall on religion and Perl culture (1999)

http://www.techgnosis.com/wall1.html

by daxelrod • 15 years ago

31 61 15 years ago

daxelrod• 15 years ago

I first saw this on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fje57 and thought it deserved HN's quality of discussion.

The original link is actually http://www.feedbag.com/re/re172_master.html but is much harder to read and shoves the interview itself off onto a second, hard-to-find page.

mckoss14• 15 years ago

It never fails to amaze me how otherwise very intelligent and thoughtful people remain stuck believing in God. I must say I can't help feel a little less impressed with people when I learn they are theists.

tshaddox• 15 years ago

Why? Different axioms are just different, and they can't be argued logically because logic only follows from the axioms. The only arguments you can make for axioms are how useful they are and, more importantly, how well you think they reflect reality as you understand it. If one of his axioms is that not every truth has objective empirical evidence to support it, how can you formulate an argument against that? All you can say is that you don't see the world as operating that way, but you certainly can't use logic or reason to argue that he's incorrect.

doorhammer10• 15 years ago

It never fails to amaze me how otherwise very intelligent and thoughtful people remain stuck believing that it's relevant whether or not someone believes in God. I must say I can't help feel a little less impressed with people when I learn they are condescending.

stopmi9• 15 years ago

but it is relevant in the scientific community..

if you are religious/spiritual, then you have to believe some phenomena are inexplicable, as they are performed/commanded by some entity we cannot comprehend

it just doesn't usually encourage the kind of inquisitive/iconoclastic/skeptical attitude that scientists need

and if you are doing research, it could also result in confirmation bias

why do you think it is not relevant? you could explain that instead of condescendingly accusing the OP of being condescending.

mckoss14• 15 years ago

Sorry. I didn't mean to be condescending. I meant to emphasize that I am puzzled to see people straddling high logical faculties, while choosing to disregard those abilities when it comes to some of their beliefs.

spudlyo• 15 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_Catholic_scientis...

doorhammer10• 15 years ago

But seriously.

I don't think it's pragmatically relevant. I'm personally what you might call a soft-atheist, and I can tell you that when it comes down to brass tacks, my general disinterest in theism or atheism of any sort does little to inform my coding.

It does, however, seem fair to say that if Wall's self-assessment is to be believed, then at least some part of his personality and personal history, which ultimately led him to developing Perl, was tightly coupled with his experiences in Christianity. Of course, I'm not saying that Christianity is somehow responsible for Perl, or that it offered a unique addition in any metaphysical way. Perhaps a near religious interest in Harry Potter would have done the same thing. I'm saying that I value social and cultural diversity as much as nature values genetic diversity. For the most part, there is a large body that seems to generally be "right," but occasionally, from the outliers and mutations, you get something that is a novel and valuable contribution.

One thing that I love about my personal tendency toward atheism is that nothing is telling me I have to care at all about what someone else's spiritual beliefs are. I'm left blissfully capable of simply looking at what they have to offer humanity, while ignoring the things that I don't think are relevant. In this case, I think the relevance of walls contribution to the world of software development is patently obvious, and anyone who would defame that on some bogus spiritual grounds is, at best, looking to give themselves a quick public pat on the back.

mckoss14• 15 years ago

I don't mean to be disrespectful to Mr. Wall. Of course I admire his brilliant creations. I made my statement in the context where those of us that rely on reason and evidence are under attack in popular culture. And people tout lists of brilliant scientists who were also Christians, as though it were proof that belief in Christianity is a reasonable philosophy.

I don't begrudge anyone their own personal beliefs. But say, perhaps, Larry had mentioned that he drew his inspiration from a 5" fairy who was constantly sitting on his shoulder. Would it not give you some pause, and amazment that an otherwise articulate and intelligent man, would have such a strange belief. However interesting or charming that may be, that's how I feel when I hear about taking enduring Christian beliefs well into adulthood.

epochwolf• 15 years ago

I fail to understand how intelligence and being a theist are inversely related. I've always thought that there were serious limits to what science can prove. There are limits we what we can directly observe and indirect observation is significantly less reliable if you can't duplicate the predicted cause.

mckoss14• 15 years ago

I think it takes an amazing disregard for evidence to hold on to being a Christian. We're not really talking about deep mysteries of the universe here. The Christian myth is so obviously false to anyone who takes an even casual look at the historical evidence.

So how is it that the human mind, while being so good at reasoning in one sphere, can be so easily defeated in another.

I have nothing against the culture or ethics of Christianity or Christians. I was raised and hold dear those ethical teachings, myself (well, some of them). It's just that it's historical myths are so obviously false - it literally does baffle me that their belief is still so pervasive in Western society (actually, much more in the US than European society).

dasil0033• 15 years ago

What do you think God is? Evangelical atheists want him to be a straw man poking his head of the clouds Monty-Python-style; but what if God is just a metaphor for everything greater than the reality we are capable of understanding in our tiny carbon-based brains? Do you really want to believe that the only things that matter in life are those that can be hypothesized, measured, and analyzed with physical instruments?

If the answer is yes, that's fine, but remember that you are taking that assertion on faith. There is simply no evidence one way or the other about what lies outside the bounds of human knowledge.

stopmi9• 15 years ago

"that which can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof"

and why give weight to the ramblings of the religious but not to all schizophrenics?

shouldn't we give both views equal respect without calling to reason?

edit: referring to the "difficult to tell the difference between real and unreal experiences/delusions/hallucinations" symptoms when i said schizophrenics

mckoss14• 15 years ago

Evidence for the way the world works is all around us. Holding onto faith in creationism and other religion-based myths is holding many people back from understanding what real evidence we have about the world.

If you want to go to the extreme of arguing that using evidence as a justification for believing (or not believing) in something is an act of faith, then I don't think we can have a reasonable argument about anything.

prodigal_erik• 15 years ago

It's not just a metaphor. Christians self-report believing much more specific things about God's opinions and demands.

As for me, I don't "want to believe" things. What I want is for the model in my head to match reality. To have reasons other than apparent truth for believing anything is to invite self-deception. It's hard enough to winnow out the nonsense our culture has saddled us with, without actually rooting for some of it.

samvelst• 15 years ago

The thing I wonder about the most is what their thought process is like. I believe any intelligent person will come to a point where they will question their faith. I'm genuinely curious as to what makes them side with faith.

I know from my own culture that one's personal image is usually the biggest factor when deciding. Atheists are pretty much outcasts in my culture.

SwellJoe2• 15 years ago

I went through a phase like that, and I still have to be careful not to let it slip into my judging process. Larry is one of the people who helped me get over it. I've met him a few times now, and he's strikingly intelligent and thoughtful. I've met very few people of that intellectual caliber, in fact, and I've met quite a few famously smart people.

The difference between a brilliant theist and a stupid one is that the brilliant one knows enough to know what they don't know. Larry's religion, while strongly held, is not a small-minded one. The Perl community is strikingly open-minded and diverse (there are many gay folks, at least a couple transgendered folks, a huge contingent of straight men wearing skirts, and all manner of folks who choose to live differently), and Larry not only accepts this diversity, he cultivated it that way. Larry is simply not what most atheists or agnostics think of when they think of "religious person".

doorhammer10• 15 years ago

One of those things that attracts me to the hacker 'ethos', so-to-speak, is seeing people reaching into disparate and esoteric depths to stitch together seemingly outlandish but uniquely powerful solutions.

I've been just as guilty of being intellectually self-righteous as anyone, but these days I see elitism of any status-quo as completely counter-productive when it comes to inspiring creativity and diversity. That said, it's hard not to slip back into it, heh.

I really enjoyed the article, and while I haven't been a Christian for some time, I'd be totally stoked to meet Larry some day. He sounds like a stand up guy.

Maybe I should start wearing a skirt.

alinajaf• 15 years ago

Personally, it never fails to amaze me how otherwise very intelligent and thoughtful people remain stuck believing in an all knowing, all powerful, and apparently all loving sentient being who lives 'inside all of us', has a host of angels, who judges you when you die and depending on who you hear it from was revealed to us in a hate-filled book through a man who found an angel in a cave and used this power to carve an empire out of the arab world or instead revealed to us as the father of an admittedly decent dude, the story of which also happened to be documented in another suitably hate-filled book.

Can you learn from their teachings? Yes. The same way you can learn from any other self-help book. The danger of religion is that it often comes loaded with a message that has been refined, over centuries, to become the perfect weapon of control over you.

For this reason, I have to agree with the original poster. Theists who buy into the above stories and others like them, do not impress me.

NB: This is of course referring to the Judeo-Christian God with a capital G, not the Deist "Supreme Architect" (which to me feels like a stepping stone for theists who feel kinda atheist but aren't ready to take the plunge yet) or the 'universe' that you feel a part of when you lose your sense of identity through drugs or meditation.

Also, spirituality and prayer aren't necessarily bad things. In Japan I bought what's essentially a talisman of the god of good entrepreneurial fortune and took it with me to job interviews. I didn't believe that it would actually increase my chances of getting a job, but it became part of my pre-interview ritual and it was somehow 'nice' to know that I'd taken it to all my interviews.

cristoperb• 15 years ago

> It never fails to amaze me how otherwise very intelligent > and thoughtful people remain stuck believing in God.

Hey! I'm a theist. Most of the time. I keep meaning to read Donald Knuth's "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About." Has anyone here read/listened to it?

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/things.html "In the fall of 1999, computer scientist Donald E. Knuth was invited to give six public lectures at MIT on the general subject of relations between faith and science."

istjohn• 15 years ago

lol:

FEED: The hacker community is full of very cantankerous and opinionated individuals. Have you gotten much grief for being so open about your Christian beliefs?

WALL: I've had no difficulty with it....I see God looking down on all these weird, cantankerous people, and kinda liking them, in an artistic fashion....There are certainly a bunch of what I would clearly label sinners out there....

xiongchiamiov• 15 years ago

...But they are real people, and they have real problems, and they just need real help...

doorhammer10• 15 years ago

I'm just glad we can all have a decent holy war over something other than text editors.

mckoss14• 15 years ago

Amen, brother!

Larry Wall on religion and Perl culture (1999)

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