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Yes, though myth is also related to romanticising, through exaggeration and emphasising universal elements. e.g. cowboys, pirates, war, police have been mytholo

Yes, though myth is also related to romanticising, through exaggeration and emphasising universal elements. e.g. cowboys, pirates, war, police have been mythologised. Really, almost any story that stirs does so by evoking these universals. I suppose naval architecture has its own traditions, a lore of heroes, conflict, inventive solution and disaster. hmmm the tale of the Titanic is one of the most mythic events of modern times - and naval architecture is right at the center. Does programming have lore? i.e. mythic stories? Figures like Turing and Babbage certainly have mythic stature, but don't seem quite right. Maybe something descended from the telegraph operators of Edison's era. Or perhaps some science fiction characters (like DNA on asking the right question), or Murphy's Law? Perhaps we move so fast (though often reinventing unnecessarily) that lore becomes dated too quickly?

dalke 11y ago
Umm, we have lots of lore in this field. "The Graphing Calculator Story" at Apple, "The Story of Mel", the entire site folklore.org, stories about Gates and the early days of Microsoft, the "IBM visiting Gary Kildall" story, the Ariane V exception, Grace Hopper and the moth stuck in a relay (and her nanosecond wire), the "Steve Jobs at Xerox" story, Stallman's description of why he started the GNU project, Torvald's first posting about Linux, the Torvalds/Tannenbaum exchange, the rumors about the CIA wanting popcount on the Cray and about the backdoor in DES, "Better is Worse", "Reflections on Trusting Trust", "Always mount a scratch monkey", anecdote collections like http://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game-developers.html http://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game-deve... . http://www.filfre.net/ http://www.filfre.net/ is going through the history of ludic games, including discussion of the lore associated with specific games. There are stories about IBM's "Black Team" ("more than one programmer was reduced to tears while having his code evaluated by the Black Team.") Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine". Robert X. Cringely's "Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date" shouldn't be read as a history book but a collection of lore about Silicon Valley. Also, I picked "engineers" and "plumbers" to show real-world examples of non-universal elements. "Architect" is another non-universal. Regarding naval architects, there's Bushnell's Turtle, Ericsson's Monitor, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Great Eastern .. and that's just from my general cultural knowledge. I assume that actual naval architects have more lore.
- hyperpallium 11y ago
  You are right. (I did at least think of Mel after writing that!) Though some of those are more industry business lore than programming lore (maybe a quibble). BTW: A universal can be an element within a story, rather than the subject. For example, anti-authoritarianism is a universal concept, and a strong theme in many of the stories. Folklore.org - how more perfect a counter to "we have no lore"? Also, reminded me of the pay-per-LoC one, and the guy who removed several thousand. This one speaks directly to a technical aspect of programming, as well as being anti-authoritarian.
  - dalke 11y ago
    I feel like you are trying to make a bigger point than is available from the evidence. The Icelandic sagas are surely part of lore, do you agree? They are prose history, and not stories of mythology. It say that Flóki Vilgerðarson climbed the mountain Hornatær, looked out, and only saw ice, which is why he named it Iceland. This and many other stories in the sagas do not try to express some universal concept, other than being how people lived. They don't all describe some sort of hero's journey or quest. I see no reason to imbue the term lore with that extra meaning. Certainly some of the stories describe anti-authoritarianism. But that it not unique to myths and legend. Real people can also be anti-authoritarian, so histories will also include accounts of anti-authoritarianism.
    - hyperpallium 11y ago
      I agree Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces is not quite compelling, but I do find it interesting. Another approach to it is: what makes stories memorable, stirring etc? Why are some stories forgetable, boring, unengaging? It has a similar perspective to the question: what makes a tune catchy? It's not about the story or tune, but the human processing system, as lossy image compression algorithms model the HVS. Though of course there's extrinsic factors as in market success: the need it fulfills (e.g. identification with a particular cultural group), surface factors, fashion, luck etc, I do think there's something to the story/tune itself. Getting back to "lore", my last resort is to look up its meaning: a body of traditions and knowledge on a subject or held by a particular group, typically passed from person to person by word of mouth. Not stories or personages at all! For coding, it could include rules of thumbs and aphorisms like the first rule of optimisation, premature optimisation, divide and conquer, YAGNI, etc. The analogous coders of lore might be the implicit originator of those aphorisms (like the sage of the tao te ching), and attributed authors like Knuth are just a connecting link. This would be in a similar category to folk wisdom and old wive's tales, that often turn out to have something to them, even when their explicit reasoning is illogical or clearly wrong. It's often passed on because - for whatever reason - things turn out better when following it.

dalke 11y ago

Umm, we have lots of lore in this field. "The Graphing Calculator Story" at Apple, "The Story of Mel", the entire site folklore.org, stories about Gates and the early days of Microsoft, the "IBM visiting Gary Kildall" story, the Ariane V exception, Grace Hopper and the moth stuck in a relay (and her nanosecond wire), the "Steve Jobs at Xerox" story, Stallman's description of why he started the GNU project, Torvald's first posting about Linux, the Torvalds/Tannenbaum exchange, the rumors about the CIA wanting popcount on the Cray and about the backdoor in DES, "Better is Worse", "Reflections on Trusting Trust", "Always mount a scratch monkey", anecdote collections like http://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game-developers.html http://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game-deve... . http://www.filfre.net/ http://www.filfre.net/ is going through the history of ludic games, including discussion of the lore associated with specific games. There are stories about IBM's "Black Team" ("more than one programmer was reduced to tears while having his code evaluated by the Black Team.") Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine". Robert X. Cringely's "Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date" shouldn't be read as a history book but a collection of lore about Silicon Valley. Also, I picked "engineers" and "plumbers" to show real-world examples of non-universal elements. "Architect" is another non-universal. Regarding naval architects, there's Bushnell's Turtle, Ericsson's Monitor, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Great Eastern .. and that's just from my general cultural knowledge. I assume that actual naval architects have more lore.

hyperpallium 11y ago
You are right. (I did at least think of Mel after writing that!) Though some of those are more industry business lore than programming lore (maybe a quibble). BTW: A universal can be an element within a story, rather than the subject. For example, anti-authoritarianism is a universal concept, and a strong theme in many of the stories. Folklore.org - how more perfect a counter to "we have no lore"? Also, reminded me of the pay-per-LoC one, and the guy who removed several thousand. This one speaks directly to a technical aspect of programming, as well as being anti-authoritarian.
- dalke 11y ago
  I feel like you are trying to make a bigger point than is available from the evidence. The Icelandic sagas are surely part of lore, do you agree? They are prose history, and not stories of mythology. It say that Flóki Vilgerðarson climbed the mountain Hornatær, looked out, and only saw ice, which is why he named it Iceland. This and many other stories in the sagas do not try to express some universal concept, other than being how people lived. They don't all describe some sort of hero's journey or quest. I see no reason to imbue the term lore with that extra meaning. Certainly some of the stories describe anti-authoritarianism. But that it not unique to myths and legend. Real people can also be anti-authoritarian, so histories will also include accounts of anti-authoritarianism.
  - hyperpallium 11y ago
    I agree Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces is not quite compelling, but I do find it interesting. Another approach to it is: what makes stories memorable, stirring etc? Why are some stories forgetable, boring, unengaging? It has a similar perspective to the question: what makes a tune catchy? It's not about the story or tune, but the human processing system, as lossy image compression algorithms model the HVS. Though of course there's extrinsic factors as in market success: the need it fulfills (e.g. identification with a particular cultural group), surface factors, fashion, luck etc, I do think there's something to the story/tune itself. Getting back to "lore", my last resort is to look up its meaning: a body of traditions and knowledge on a subject or held by a particular group, typically passed from person to person by word of mouth. Not stories or personages at all! For coding, it could include rules of thumbs and aphorisms like the first rule of optimisation, premature optimisation, divide and conquer, YAGNI, etc. The analogous coders of lore might be the implicit originator of those aphorisms (like the sage of the tao te ching), and attributed authors like Knuth are just a connecting link. This would be in a similar category to folk wisdom and old wive's tales, that often turn out to have something to them, even when their explicit reasoning is illogical or clearly wrong. It's often passed on because - for whatever reason - things turn out better when following it.