holy wars

n. [from Usenet , but may predate it; common] n. flame wars over religious
issues. The paper by Danny Cohen that popularized the terms big-endian and
little-endian in connection with the LSB-first/MSB-first controversy was
entitled On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace. Great holy wars of the past have
included ITS vs Unix, Unix vs VMS, BSD Unix vs System V, C vs Rust,
Python vs Perl, init vs systemd, vim vs Emacs, etc.

The characteristic that distinguishes holy wars from normal technical
disputes is that in a holy war most of the participants spend their time
trying to pass off personal value choices and cultural attachments as
objective technical evaluations. This happens precisely because in a
true holy war, the actual substantive differences between the sides are
relatively minor. See also theology.
