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I'm not religious but I've always liked this; it's fun to think of the SQLite developers as a small monastery. If monasteries can produce beer for the world (se
by ripley12 4y ago
I'm not religious but I've always liked this; it's fun to think of the SQLite developers as a small monastery. If monasteries can produce beer for the world (see: the Trappists), why not software?
- wyager 4y agoIf software engineering was available as a monastic vocation, we'd probably have a lot of significantly higher-quality software available. I would much rather use something written by a stylite with an esolang compiler than shat out by 100 poorly-coordinated javascript devs at MEGACORP.
- defenestration 4y agoThere is a truth hidden in here. I would love to spend time at a monastry and code.
- nemo1618 4y agoYou can! I spent a week co-working at MAPLE (https://www.monasticacademy.com https://www.monasticacademy.com) earlier this month, living among monastics and participating in their practice. Honestly, I didn't get a lot of programming done, but that's probably because my goal shifted rather quickly from "get a lot of work done" to "take advantage of this rare opportunity to develop my meditation practice." Still, I think it'd be a great environment for focused programming: you're in a quiet, beautiful setting, your meals are taken care of, and you're surrounded by people who are diligent, respectful, and committed to solving important problems.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bardan 4y agoCoding in the scriptorium, no less.
- don-code 4y agoYou may enjoy reading Neal Stephenson's _Anathem_.
- wyager 4y agoI certainly did!
- ThrowawayR2 4y agoI dunno about monastic programming getting a lot of takers. Don't forget that there's usually a vow of poverty involved; fully loaded Macbook Pros or decked out 16 core Threadripper workstations are not part of the picture.
- pvillano 4y agoSome software can be written on a raspberry pi. Truly accessible software should be able to run on anything, for example, government web sites. Someone on here developed a site that a homeless person was able to submit a form using a PSP.
- BeFlatXIII 4y agoHowever, a communal Mac Pro may be part of the infrastructure. It's a vow of individual poverty, but that doesn't mean the monastery itself does not contain riches that its monks have access to but do not privately own.
- ticviking 4y agoThe vow of poverty tends to mean not accumulating real estate or a retirement account. The tools of a trade and other personal necessities are allowed. Different monasteries enforce this different ways
- bardan 4y agoI'm imagining it more like the work suckless do. Simplicity, beauty. Multiple cores are an extravagance.
- ticviking 4y agoI’ve often wondered at the validity of pursing a vocation as an Oblate and supporting myself by consulting and providing software “lovingly made by monks at prayer”
- sorokod 4y agoA path "Anathem" did not explore.What would millenarians do with a software project?
- Lio 4y agoOf course not. That would be strictly something for the Ita to deal with. :D
- sorokod 4y agoOh I don't know, they could build computers using mechanical contraptions. You can do a lot in a thousand years if you put your mind to it.
- Lio 4y agoI don't know that sounds like mechanical praxis to me. If it wasn't grandfathered in then it was probably banned in a Convox.
- sorokod 4y agoThat is possible. Maybe some avout would develop a discipline where they execute programs in their minds. Some sort of Chinese Room setup but for general purpose computing.
- duskwuff 4y agoSomething like this is actually hinted at in the novel, about halfway through Part 9: > The Orithenans had used a system of computational chanting that, it was plain to see, was rooted in traditions that their founders had brought over from Edhar. To that point, it was clearly recognizable to any Edharian. It was a way of carrying out computations on patterns of information by permuting a given string of notes into new melodies. The permutation was done on the fly by following certain rules, defined using the formalism of cellular automata. After the Second Sack reforms, newly computerless avout had invented this kind of music. In some concents it had withered away, in others mutated into something else, but at Edhar it had always been practiced seriously. We'd all learned it as a sort of children's musical game. But at Orithena they had been doing new things with it, using it to solve problems. Or rather to solve a problem, the nature of which I didn't understand yet. Anyway, it sounded good -- the results, for some reason, just tended to be more musical than the Edharian version, which was serviceable for computing things, but, as music, could be hard to take.
- walleeee 4y agothere's an argument monasteries gave birth to the modern European scientific tradition too
- deepsun 4y agoOr Ancient Greece (and later Rome), some 500 years before the monasteries.
- eitland 4y agoAncient Greeks did not send representatives to my country at least. The Church did however and brought with it a lot of knowledge.
- walleeee 4y agoSure, guess I should say *modern European, or perhaps English Bacon, Grosseteste, etc
- diegoholiveira 4y ago> Or Ancient Greece (and later Rome), some 500 years before the monasteries. And we know this because monasteries kept a large army of monks guarding the knowledge so that it would one day serve society.
- kingofpandora 4y agoMuch of ancient Greek knowledge comes to us because the Arabs preserved it. Some of them were Christians of course (so the occasional monastery may have been involved) but mostly not.
- diegoholiveira 4y agoYes, the Arabs keep some, Europeans keep others. That’s why I use the word “much” in the beginning of my statement.
- ticviking 4y ago