Friday, February 26, 2016

Why Does Programming Have So Many Holy Wars?

I was chatting with my brother and my Dad about the silly arguments programmers get into. Editors (me: vim, bro: emacs, dad: brief). Tabs vs spaces (all: spaces), bracket placement,  C vs C++,  Inheritance vs composition, the list goes on and on. Why?

I guess its because unlike say, space travel that was highly documented by a single agency, or say civil engineering which is regulated by building code and strict best practice rules, coding developed ad-hoc. Hackers all maker their own rules and basically these are just territory gang fights. Whatever.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hm, well I have to say I work in the space industry and if you saw the code in the mission control system I have to work with, which is the system ESA and DLR is flying missions, you would think differently. Same there. It's just good old beliefs about stuff/technology/library/tools you learned and have yourself accustomed to. It's always the same old question: why do humans do the things they do? Because either its valuable to them or they believe they do the right things or both. There's no other reason.

kbongos said...

I'm with your Dad - Brief rules! I use my own text editor(well sometimes) I wrote when migrating to Linux that emulates Brief(cause that's what I used in dos, windoze land). I call it Grief. It's a crude console app but has zero dependency issues. I can compile and run it on Windoze or Linuz. I use what's in front of me now, preferably gui that supports basic stuff, but sometimes console has advantages.

kbongos