If programming languages were religions

http://www.aegisub.net/2008/12/if-programming-languages-were-religions.html

by imgabe • 18 years ago

131 106 18 years ago

stcredzero4• 18 years ago

Actually, they are religions! Didn't you know?

juliend2• 18 years ago

Some people tend to see it as a meme. It's not THAT far from a religion. Except, i didn't see any C++ programmer kill in the name of Bjarne Stroustrup...Yet.

Shooter• 18 years ago

(They do...but they're careful to hide the bodies.)

thalur• 18 years ago

Isn't that what happens when you write (poor) safety critical software in C++?

Retric4• 18 years ago

Yep, ASM is the one true path that directly interfaces you with the underlying messy reality, but is only truly understood by a few arcane practitioners.

Aka it's Quantum Mechanics ;)

listic• 18 years ago

I think ASM would be Atheism

stcredzero4• 18 years ago

Sorry, but designing CPU hardware is really quantum mechanics, both in your analogy and in reality.

yters• 18 years ago

Especially if you can use them to create a friendly AI singularity.

zupatol• 18 years ago

My religion changes after work.

That makes me think of the jews who live in Saudi Arabia and know enough of the Coran to pass as muslims.

Java would be islam then. No wonder it sounds indonesian.

danteembermage• 18 years ago

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.religion.emacs/topics

Dilpil• 18 years ago

This will go down as a classic piece of programming humor.

edw519• 18 years ago

...then this photo proves that Dick Pick must have been the Messiah:

http://jes.com/gfx/people/csn_1983_11_28_antigrav_dick_001.j...

(Sure don't mean to offend anyone, just a silly hacker joke.)

olefoo• 18 years ago

The bit about Judaism and C reminds me of http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/ten-commandments.html

russell2• 18 years ago

Commandment 8 reminds me of the Brace Wars in C and the Indent 4 vs Indent 8 camps. Those who dislike Python's significant white space haven't seen real bloodshed.

shaunxcode2• 18 years ago

I feel the omission of smalltalk is just further evidence of it's true strength considering it inspired so many of the attributes of the other religions yet still persists unknown to the masses as the true religion with no religion behind all religion.

aaronblohowiak5• 18 years ago

I was going to make a comment about ALGOL being zoroastrianism, but your smalltalk comment will suffice.

jhancock• 18 years ago

amen brother

jcromartie3• 18 years ago

If C is Judaism then Smalltalk is Jesus and Objective-C is Orthodox Christianity.

incomethax• 18 years ago

What does that make javascript then?

asdflkj• 18 years ago

Astrology.

rsheridan63• 18 years ago

You'd think from the name that it's like Java, which is analogous to Judaism, but it really has nothing to do with Java. Maybe Madonna-style pop Kabala?

icey3• 18 years ago

Gnosticism

IsaacSchlueter2• 18 years ago

Javascript would be some kind of new-agey pop religion.

It looks at first like Christianity or Judaism, but it somehow brings in funky zen concepts like lambdas and prototype chains. No one really took it seriously, then one day, it was just everywhere. No two implementations are quite the same, and most people do it horribly.

nuclear_eclipse• 18 years ago

So, Astrology?

lallysingh• 18 years ago

Deepak Chopra.

szopa• 18 years ago

Hm, JavaScript is in fact a nice little Scheme with a cute little object system originating from Self with an ugly, ugly, ugly C-like/Javaish syntax and some dark, horrible secrets (like an asymmetric, atransitive `=='). Moreover, a lot of people use it, but not so many understand it...

My guess is that JavaScript is Zensunni: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zensunni#Zensunni.

manny• 18 years ago

well. someone doesn't like Perl.

Sheesh!

cabalamat• 18 years ago

I fear you underestimate the number of people who dislike Perl.

jrockway3• 18 years ago

Yeah, Perl sucks. Instead of making me rewrite libraries, I have to actually work on the problem I want to solve, 'cause the libraries already work. I hate being productive!!1!

SwellJoe3• 18 years ago

I merely don't misinterpret lack of understanding as dislike.

jbjohns4• 18 years ago

He was actually pretty nice to perl (even went as far as to say you will have to use it). What exactly would he have had to say for you not to be offended? Say it's as readable as Python? It isn't.

nobosh• 18 years ago

IF???

jrockway3• 18 years ago

Summary:

"I have never written more than 10 lines of code in any language."

eru9• 18 years ago

Terse programs are a worthy goal.

jbjohns4• 18 years ago

Terse no, absolutely not. Concise should be the goal.

dilanj• 18 years ago

"Lisp would be Zen Buddhism" & "Python would be Humanism"

I feel strangely peaceful.

byrneseyeview• 18 years ago

As soon as I saw the title, I knew Lisp would be Zen. I don't think that takes any thought -- regardless of their actual qualities, they have the same mystique.

rsheridan63• 18 years ago

I had a slightly different take on it: Scheme as Zen, and CL as Tibetan Buddhism, which has added deities and other more complicated theology back into Buddhism, sort of like the complexity of CL.

jcromartie3• 18 years ago

Actually I'm more inclined to believe that Forth is Zen Buddhism for the following reasons:

* Syntax is an illusion, created by our own subjective definitions of words.

* All suffering (stack management trouble) is caused by the desire for and attachment to the worldly concept of variables.

russell2• 18 years ago

He left out assembly languages which are really unrelated tribal religions characterized by primitive belief systems and rites of passage such as killing a lion, hanging by your thumbs, full body tattoos, or living alone in a cave for a month. I know. I passed my trial. I am a real man.

MaysonL2• 18 years ago

No - assembly language is the perennial philosophy uniting the mystics of all religions.

eru9• 18 years ago

That does not contradict. By the way, lambda calculus and post's correspondence system underlie..

shaunxcode2• 18 years ago

Also does this make the jvm and or parrot like one of those weird new-age "all paths lead to the sun" sort of religions where "anything goes"/syntax so long as it involves some rough idea of a god/bytecode?

mynameishere3• 18 years ago

Dumb article. Judaism and C are about as opposite as you can get. Judaism's texts (the bible and the Talmud) are famously convoluted, contradictory, debated, etc. C is one of the cleanest languages.

aaronblohowiak5• 18 years ago

And, Taoism is more like Forth.

eru9• 18 years ago

Yes, Haskell may be Platonism where ideas are more real than the messy world we live in.

Retric4• 18 years ago

"Judaism's texts (the bible and the Talmud) are famously convoluted, contradictory, debated, etc." that sounds like C's type system to me. Is that a char or a number? A pointer or a number? etc.

mynameishere3• 18 years ago

  int a; //This is a number
  char b; //This is a char.
  void * c; //This is a pointer.
  x=*((int*)a); //This is a void pointer cast to a number.

MrRage• 18 years ago

Ultimately everything's a number in a computer, so this is not something only in C. It's just C's low-level nature.

jmtame• 18 years ago

Visual Basic would be Satanism - Except that you don't REALLY need to sell your soul to be a Satanist...

Dim! Yuck.

brandonkm• 18 years ago

There is some truth to that statement.

gruseom• 18 years ago

That reminds me of the one about the dyslexic devil-worshipper who sold his soul to Santa.

thomasmallen• 18 years ago

Saw that exact comment on Reddit. Make of that what you will.

retyred• 18 years ago

his comments on C are completely unfounded. C's type coercion means you can ram all sorts of things into places they aren't supposed to go. typecasting says to me that there is nothing orthodox about C at all. if anything it is modern protestantism, a faith that lets you ram in whatever you want, but one wrong move and you go to hell (segfault)

ii• 18 years ago

If hell is segfault, then Heaven must be a memory leak?

aaronblohowiak5• 18 years ago

return(1);

ramchip• 18 years ago

Heaven is where C programmers go when they move to C++ and discover shared_ptr.

rms• 18 years ago

You can convert into Judaism.

netcan3• 18 years ago

I wouldn't recommend it.

eru9• 18 years ago

Tried?

bazookaaa• 18 years ago

"Ruby - A mixture of different languages and ideas that was beaten together into something that might be identified as a language."

Is that really true? I've never heard anything like that about Ruby. It does, however, sound very much like PHP. From the PHP FAQs:

"Much of [PHP's] syntax is borrowed from C, Java and Perl with a couple of unique PHP-specific features thrown in."

jmtulloss• 18 years ago

You could make the case. To me, Ruby looks like a strange hybrid of Python, SmallTalk, and Perl.

icey3• 18 years ago

This makes Ruby sound far more attractive than it really is to me.

jcromartie3• 18 years ago

Ruby is Smalltalk with Perl syntax.

apsurd• 18 years ago

I enjoyed this article. However I find it important to note that buddhism and taoism are philosophies and not religions.

netcan3• 18 years ago

I think people saying things like that are taken into account.

dhimes2• 18 years ago

I've read many analyses of languages: their pros and cons, how much better I would think if I used them, how much more efficient I would be if I used them, how much cooler I would be if I used them.

But nothing was enough to convince to change. Until this. Fundamentalist Christianity. Well, goddamn.

How can I distribute desktop apps in Lisp? :)

MaysonL2• 18 years ago

Use Factor, the postfix Lisp.

dhimes2• 18 years ago

Excellent. Thanks!

known• 18 years ago

You can convert to Judaism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ger_tzedek

GrandMasterBirt• 18 years ago

I don't understand how anyone can be against us Pastafarians/Lolcoders!!! What is wrong with everyone? Just because I write legibly does not mean that I don't want my code to tell me that its in my pants waiting for input!

And obviously you all have not been blessed by his noodly appendages, but I shall not go and spread our sacred gospel, he shall come and touch you with his noodliness and you shall instantly convert.

trezor• 18 years ago

PHP would be Cafeteria Christianity ... whole concept of "goto hell" was abandoned.

And here I would consider PHP the defintion of going to hell :)

eru9• 18 years ago

"Haskell would be Taoism - It is so different from other languages [...]"

I do not get it. Haskell is very similar to other languages, take Clean for example.

tylermenezes• 18 years ago

You mean they aren't already?

If programming languages were religions

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