16 lines
823 B
Plaintext
16 lines
823 B
Plaintext
holy wars
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n. [from Usenet , but may predate it; common] n. flame wars over religious
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issues. The paper by Danny Cohen that popularized the terms big-endian and
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little-endian in connection with the LSB-first/MSB-first controversy was
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entitled On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace. Great holy wars of the past have
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included ITS vs Unix, Unix vs VMS, BSD Unix vs System V, C vs Rust,
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Python vs Perl, init vs systemd, vim vs Emacs, etc.
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The characteristic that distinguishes holy wars from normal technical
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disputes is that in a holy war most of the participants spend their time
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trying to pass off personal value choices and cultural attachments as
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objective technical evaluations. This happens precisely because in a
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true holy war, the actual substantive differences between the sides are
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relatively minor. See also theology.
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