18 lines
1.0 KiB
Plaintext
18 lines
1.0 KiB
Plaintext
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.
|
|
|