[clug] [OT] Broadband clangers

[Alex Satrapa]

On 12/08/2010, at 15:00 , Scott Ferguson wrote:

> http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2010/02/demons-really.html

To be fair, once you can describe something like "Sloth" as a demon, it becomes easier to explain to people how to expurgate that demon from the source code of their mind.  Being able to externalise the condition as a "demon" makes it easier to accept that the behaviour is occurring, and thus accept responsibility for stopping the behaviour.

In much the same way, explaining to a guy that "there's this bug that somehow creeped into your code" helps externalise the flaw in the guy's work as "a bug" rather than "your mistake". It's not like the bug is *really* an entity that worked his way into your code without your knowledge. But we talk about them that way, don't we?

So why is it okay for programmers to talk about "bugs", but it's not okay for religious folks to talk about "demons" without being ridiculed?  Their failure to understand the programming language of the human brain doesn't stop the bugs from existing does it?  Do *you* know the programming language of the brain?

Purging someone of Sloth is pretty much the same as debugging that performance issue where the database was being hit for every iteration of a loop. Part of the process is removing the immediate problem, the rest is figuring out how that problem got there in the first place, and adjusting the attitude of the person responsible (in the coding world we talk about "design patterns", in the personal development world you might talk about "healthy habits").

I can't help but wonder why Linus felt the need to ridicule those people, just because he didn't understand what they were talking about.

Now Ada programmers on the other hand, they're fair game.