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

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

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

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shaunxcode
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.

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

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

I feel strangely peaceful.

~~~
byrneseyeview
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.

~~~
rsheridan6
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.

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kylec
And Arc would be Zn Bdsm: basically the same as Zen Buddhism, only more terse.

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rsheridan6
>Bdsm

And a little perverse.

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jrockway
Summary:

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

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eru
Terse programs are a worthy goal.

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

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eru
OK. Mixed up the words. Should practise my english some more.

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jbjohns
Ah, enough people say programming languages should be terse that I thought
that's exactly what you meant.

Concise is clear and short, terse is less characters but unreadable.

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stcredzero
Actually, they _are_ religions! Didn't you know?

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juliend2
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.

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

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

Dim! Yuck.

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

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

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incomethax
What does that make javascript then?

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IsaacSchlueter
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
So, Astrology?

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IsaacSchlueter
Maybe… _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. ;)

~~~
herval
does anyone really do javascript fulltime...? It sounds to me like doing CSS
fulltime. Or writing XML configuration files for a living. Or something...

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

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russell
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.

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bazookaaa
_"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."_

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

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

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aaronblohowiak
What would you change about it?

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icey
Well, 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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jpd
I find python's clarity lacking in comparison to ruby, at least in terms of
making classes and iterators. Why are all those underscores really necessary?

No mention on your other points here because I either agree or don't have an
experienced opinion on the matter.

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edw519
...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...](http://jes.com/gfx/people/csn_1983_11_28_antigrav_dick_001.jpg)

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

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shaunxcode
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?

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mynameishere
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.

~~~
Retric
"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.

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mynameishere

      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.

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mynameishere
The [edit] link disappeared on me, or I would just correct the last 'a' to a
'c'.

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rms
You can convert into Judaism.

~~~
netcan
I wouldn't recommend it.

~~~
eru
Tried?

~~~
netcan
Yup

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manny
well. someone doesn't like Perl.

Sheesh!

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

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jrockway
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!

~~~
run4yourlives
Using 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
If you don't think Perl is a productive language, then you have never been a
UNIX system administrator.

~~~
run4yourlives
The irony of that statement is creating a vortex of it's own. ;-)

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SwellJoe
Irony...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.

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dhimes
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? :)

~~~
MaysonL
Use Factor, the postfix Lisp.

~~~
dhimes
Excellent. Thanks!

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eru
"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.

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

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

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

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tylermenezes
You mean they aren't already?

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nobosh
IF???

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

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

~~~
brl
Where do C++ programmers go when the move to Java and discover garbage
collection?

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herval
To the second level. Where do you think they go when they move over to
Python/Ruby/whatever and find out dynamic typing?

ask Dante Alighieri...

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GrandMasterBirt
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.

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trezor
_PHP would be Cafeteria Christianity ... whole concept of "goto hell" was
abandoned._

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

