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4 lines
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holy wars
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n. [from Usenet , but may predate it; common] n. flame war s 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.: Pascal , C vs.: FORTRAN, etc. In the year 2003, popular favorites of the day are KDE vs, GNOME, vim vs. elvis, Linux vs. [Free|Net|Open]BSD. Hardy perennials include EMACS vs.: vi , my personal computer vs.: everyone else's personal computer, ad nauseam. 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.
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