2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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holy wars
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2014-07-26 03:53:53 -04:00
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n. [from Usenet , but may predate it; common] n. flame wars over religious
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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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.:
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Pascal , C vs.: FORTRAN, etc. In the year 2003, popular favorites of the day
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are KDE vs, GNOME, vim vs. elvis, Linux vs. [Free|Net|Open]BSD. Hardy
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perennials include EMACS vs.: vi , my personal computer vs.: everyone else's
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personal computer, ad nauseam. The characteristic that distinguishes holy
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wars from normal technical disputes is that in a holy war most of the
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participants spend their time trying to pass off personal value choices and
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cultural attachments as objective technical evaluations. This happens
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precisely because in a true holy war, the actual substantive differences
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between the sides are relatively minor. See also theology.
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