holy wars

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.

