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If programming languages were religions
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- mynameishere 18y agoDumb 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.
- aaronblohowiak 18y agoAnd, Taoism is more like Forth.
- eru 18y agoYes, Haskell may be Platonism where ideas are more real than the messy world we live in.
- Retric 18y 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.
- mynameishere 18y agoint 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.
- mynameishere 18y agoThe [edit] link disappeared on me, or I would just correct the last 'a' to a 'c'.
- MrRage 18y agoUltimately everything's a number in a computer, so this is not something only in C. It's just C's low-level nature.
- eru 18y agoComputers are so good at simulating numbers, they sometimes fool us into believing that they are made of the stuff.
- stcredzero 18y agoActually, they are religions! Didn't you know?
- zupatol 18y agoMy 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.
- juliend2 18y agoSome 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.
- Retric 18y agoYep, 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 ;)
- Dilpil 18y agoThis will go down as a classic piece of programming humor.
- edw519 18y 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.jpg 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 18y agoThe bit about Judaism and C reminds me of http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/ten-commandments.html http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/ten-commandments.html
- russell 18y agoCommandment 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.
- shaunxcode 18y agoI 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.
- aaronblohowiak 18y agoI was going to make a comment about ALGOL being zoroastrianism, but your smalltalk comment will suffice.
- jhancock 18y agoamen brother
- jcromartie 18y agoIf C is Judaism then Smalltalk is Jesus and Objective-C is Orthodox Christianity.
- incomethax 18y agoWhat does that make javascript then?
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- asdflkj 18y agoAstrology.
- rsheridan6 18y agoYou'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?
- icey 18y agoGnosticism
- IsaacSchlueter 18y agoJavascript 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 18y agoSo, Astrology?
- IsaacSchlueter 18y agoMaybe… disclaimer: I'm a professional javascripter 1. Everyone knows it a little, but few actually use it for much, and hardly anyone really understands it. 2. A lot of the ideas came out of old tribal warfare, and was only standardized relatively recently. 3. People who do it full time are WAY overpaid. ;)
- manny 18y agowell. someone doesn't like Perl. Sheesh!
- cabalamat 18y agoI fear you underestimate the number of people who dislike Perl.
- jrockway 18y agoYeah, 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!
- run4yourlives 18y agoUsing the words PERL and productive without a not qualifier in the same sentence opens up some sort of alternate universe time warp that is so dangerous it should be avoided at all costs.
- SwellJoe 18y agoIf you don't think Perl is a productive language, then you have never been a UNIX system administrator.
- run4yourlives 18y agoThe irony of that statement is creating a vortex of it's own. ;-)
- SwellJoe 18y agoIrony...like rain on your wedding day? Or maybe a traffic jam when you're already late? I'm not sure you and I are working with the same definition of irony here. You don't like Perl, that we understand. But if you can honestly say you believe that Perl is not among the most productive, if not the most productive, glue languages for use in UNIX system administration tasks...then, well, I don't know what to say. One can't really have a rational discussion with someone who is that far off the map.
- nobosh 18y agoIF???
- jrockway 18y agoSummary: "I have never written more than 10 lines of code in any language."
- dilanj 18y ago"Lisp would be Zen Buddhism" & "Python would be Humanism" I feel strangely peaceful.
- byrneseyeview 18y agoAs 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.
- rsheridan6 18y agoI 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.
- kylec 18y agoAnd Arc would be Zn Bdsm: basically the same as Zen Buddhism, only more terse.
- rsheridan6 18y ago>Bdsm And a little perverse.
- blasdel 18y agoNo, Arc would be the short-lived personality cult of a popular Guru.
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- jcromartie 18y agoActually 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.
- russell 18y agoHe 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.
- shaunxcode 18y agoAlso 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?
- jmtame 18y agoVisual Basic would be Satanism - Except that you don't REALLY need to sell your soul to be a Satanist... Dim! Yuck.
- brandonkm 18y agoThere is some truth to that statement.
- gruseom 18y agoThat reminds me of the one about the dyslexic devil-worshipper who sold his soul to Santa.
- thomasmallen 18y agoSaw that exact comment on Reddit. Make of that what you will.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- gruseom 18y agoAs the original poster stated, please don't kill me if you are offended. Its aim was humor. Bit of a tangent, but I never understand why people say this. Don't they know that humor is one of the most potent weapons? If someone is offended, will they be less offended that they are regarded as laughable? (Tangent to the tangent - this reminds me a little of Jon Stewart hiding behind "But I'm only a comedian" every time someone wants to talk about the politics in his satire. I happen to like his satire a lot and have no particular objection to his politics, but this is just disingenuous.)
- teehee 18y agoMerry Christmas.
- retyred 18y agohis 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 18y agoIf hell is segfault, then Heaven must be a memory leak?
- aaronblohowiak 18y agoreturn(1);
- cracki 18y agoi'm always wondering why people feel the need to dress up the return keyword as a function.
- ramchip 18y agoHeaven is where C programmers go when they move to C++ and discover shared_ptr.
- rms 18y agoYou can convert into Judaism.
- bazookaaa 18y 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 18y agoYou could make the case. To me, Ruby looks like a strange hybrid of Python, SmallTalk, and Perl.
- icey 18y agoThis makes Ruby sound far more attractive than it really is to me.
- aaronblohowiak 18y agoWhat would you change about it?
- habibur 18y agoSpeed
- icey 18y agoWell, when I hear that something is a mix of a bunch of other things, I tend to picture the best about those things. So if Ruby had: * The clarity of Python * As well as the batteries-includedness of Python * With the flexibility of Perl * As well as a library managed as well as CPAN * With the tooling of Smalltalk * But without the weird VM business Then Ruby would be much more attractive to me. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with Ruby, it's a fine language. I'm just saying that I hear those three things and I picture some sort of uber-language.
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- apsurd 18y agoI enjoyed this article. However I find it important to note that buddhism and taoism are philosophies and not religions.
- netcan 18y agoI think people saying things like that are taken into account.
- dhimes 18y agoI'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? :)
- known 18y agoYou can convert to Judaism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ger_tzedek http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ger_tzedek
- GrandMasterBirt 18y agoI 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 18y agoPHP would be Cafeteria Christianity ... whole concept of "goto hell" was abandoned. And here I would consider PHP the defintion of going to hell :)
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- eru 18y 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 18y agoYou mean they aren't already?