Coding as… a religion?!
So there I was.... sitting in "Popular Religion and Cyberspace" minding my own darn business when BAM, professor assigns a paper! Uncool... What did the paper have to be on? A form of folk, popular, or vernacular religion that we'd experienced. That was the entire assignment description. Right quick I'll tell you that these are folklore terms for religions that: differ from a formal religion slightly; are of a repressed group; or the personal beliefs of people and how they perceive religion, respectively.
Now I had an initial idea to write about the religion found in Walraven, but after talking with the creater for a bit, decided this wasn't gonna work. So, the other guys on the IRC channel (developers of walraven / friends of them) started throwing out other ideas related to coding, and I took them and ran with it. Here's what I came up with:
Basically a central part of a hacker's mindset (those that program) is to come up with the most elegant solution for a problem. This may not be the most obvious choice... for instance Carmack (one of the developers behind Quake) has this beauty. It calculates the 1/sqrt(x)... quite fast. In this singlemindedness for elegant code, some coders have various rituals they follow. While most are joking, or just not ritualistic (such as only coding with certain music, or environments), I do know some that take a religious feel. I actually surprised myself by realizing some of my practices classify as religions according to folklore definitions. For instance, jokingly, when I get stuck on code, one of the things I do to prevent myself from breaking stuff is to turn out whatever lights I can, remove my shirt, and draw "Imbued Symbols" on my chest... What do I mean by that? Basically... anything dealing with the language I'm using... Lambdas for scheme, ones, zeros, reg expressions, whatever. Its really joking, but for some reason it helps to focus my mind on the code.
I've even been on coding binges (worst was 20 hours straight after a bad time in my life) where I lose conciousness of the environment around me. My roommate's talked to me in this state before, and I have no knowledge of the conversation. I've, apparently, cursed people up and down in this state, people I'd never curse at, and didn't remember a thing until they confronted be about it. This is called a "heightened state of awareness" with regard to something, in this case code, and nothing else. I know of other programmers who've been sucked in enough by the code to not notice the passage of time, or people talking to them, so I know I'm not just a freak.
Anyways, the professor of this class took 15 minutes today for me to discuss with the class my theory (that this constitutes a vernacular relgion... how each person deals with code) and they were very receptive. In fact, the teacher gave me full credit on the paper, and said that while he wasn't sure he'd buy it when he picked up the paper, he now is fully convinced that at least a very persuasive argument (and that I made a very persuasive one) could be made to that effect, and the rest of the class agreed this could be viewed as a vernacular religion.
Interesting... could I have just coined a new religion without intending to?
