Computer language use and religious affiliation
January 26, 2008
I’ve put up a small survey which I’m hoping will help me get an idea of whether there’s any connection between computer language choice and religious identification. Do Catholics gravitate towards Java? Are Python users more likely to be Baptist? It’s basically a ‘fun’ thing - I don’t claim it’ll be scientific, but I’m still interested in the results. Please take a few moments and participate!
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Posted in Development, Grails, Groovy, Ideas, Java, Javascript, Language, PHP, Religion, Software, opensource
January 26th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
You’re missing an awful lot of languages. No Jython or Erlang or Haskell…
January 26th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
Added. Please give me more to add - the earlier the better! Thanks!
January 26th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Objective-C? OCaml?
Perhaps you should add a ‘Other’ field for languages, comma delimited.
January 26th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Good call Tim - added. I was unsure about that initially, but there’s already been another 5 languages I added already that it made sense to do that. Thanks!
January 26th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
You forgot Scheme!
January 26th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
Added Scheme. There is the option of adding anything you want in the ‘other’ box as well. Good catch Sasha!
January 26th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Wow - over 150 responses in the past 5 hours, and it’s a Saturday night / Sunday morning. Hopefully we can keep the momentum going and get many more participants in the next few weeks!
Thanks to everyone who’s already participated and helped get the word out!
January 27th, 2008 at 12:26 am
The results of this survey should be pretty interesting. Good idea and thanks for sharing. =)
January 27th, 2008 at 1:26 am
This reminds me of a study that a friend told me about that found that Computer Scientists were more likely to be religious than Scientists in other fields.
While this may not be completely accurate, (I never found the study that they spoke of) it makes a lot of sense to me. A programmer’s entire profession revolves around creating worlds using whatever rules and properties that they feel are best. This would definitely support the opinion that the universe has a similar creation process, i.e. A God that designs the universe via rules and properties.
Needless to say, I look forwards to seeing the results of this ’study’.
January 27th, 2008 at 1:57 am
it’s funny how you subdivide christian denominations but not those of jewish, muslim or hindu religions.
the 3 major muslim sects (afaik) are shiite, suni & sufi.
the denomiations(schools)and movements of buddhism seem rather complicated to me
-> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schools_of_Buddhism
the hindu sects can be broken up, generically, into vaishnavite, saivite, smarta, and shakti.
I’m not saying your survey is a bad idea, i’m just saying if you’re going to do a religion programming language survey, you should be more graduated in it
also 2 other questions, shoudln’t you have a flag for ‘non-practicing’ ?
and what about people who are of one religion (or agnostic or atheist) but whose cultural tradition is catholic or hindu, or what have you? where would such a person fall on your survey?
January 27th, 2008 at 2:24 am
@matt - great thoughts!
@vat - if you think i should offer subdivisions on the muslim options, I can do that. I’m more familiar with the Christian schools, and didn’t want to offend the Muslim sects by mis-dividing. This really was something I thought I’d get a couple hundred responses over a week or so - didn’t think I’d get over 700 in the first few hours! On the ‘practicing/non’ - that’s a good idea too, but I’m not sure adding it now would help much. I’m hoping that non-practicings may put agnostic or something. is there a better way to handle this? Well, @ this stage, changing the parameters might make it too hard to parse or understand the results.
Thanks everyone!
January 27th, 2008 at 2:52 am
I’ve noticed that there seems to be a correlation between Christianity and Perl programming. Perhaps it’s a case of insane people preferring insane languages?
January 27th, 2008 at 7:14 am
What? No labels? You really want me to concentrate to have to hit those tiny boxes?
Also looking forward to the results, however silly a test this might be.
January 27th, 2008 at 7:42 am
@martin - I’ll see what I can do about labels today.
January 27th, 2008 at 8:02 am
One thing I’ve been surprised at is the negativity around this, though perhaps I’m just reading a bit too much in to a few comments. Of the comments posted at dzone.com, for example, they’re things like “delete it”, and “I don’t see what you hope to achieve with this”. From reddit there was a comment “Nothing good can come from this” and a couple others.
Now these may be in the minority, but it would have been interesting to me to see what religious affiliation those people who were/are ‘against’ this sort of survey have.
Given there’s been over 1700 entries so far, perhaps I’m reading too much in to those comments, and most people really are cool with this idea. BTW, I added a ‘comment’ area at the bottom so new submissions can add a small comment as well if they need to. Should have added it yesterday but forgot. Oh well…
Thanks again!
January 27th, 2008 at 10:10 am
What a fantastic and original idea for a survey. What was the catalyst for this? I can’t wait to see the results.
January 27th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
@Richard
I wrote elsewhere that the original idea was brought about because I was wondering if ’strongly typed’ vs ‘weakly typed’ languages had any correlation to religions - absolutism vs relativism, perhaps. The end result survey doesn’t quite do the best job of capturing that particular data set, but it’s ended up being open ended enough such that I think the results may still be interesting anyway. Or not - no real way to tell until later. I may start doing some ‘dynamic’ view of the data before the survey’s closed, but I have no firm plans for that yet.
Thanks!
January 27th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
Nice to see agnostic and atheist being two different options. You know the latter is the superset of the former, right? So it may be a good idea to allow users to select multiple religion options at the same time.
One more thing: satanist would be an important and interesting option to see. Some people would certainly turn it into a joke, but it’s worth a try i guess.
January 27th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
I’ve considered the multiple religions option, but as it’s so far in to it as it stands, changing the terms that drastically now would skew whatever semblance of accuracy there might be in the results. There is the option for ‘other’, and people are using that in some measure.
I know about the super/subset angle, but I’ve talked to a number of developers who are very adamant about being agnostic, but not atheist. It felt like there was enough of a distinction to make there so I made it. I wish I’d split up the Muslim category more, and had a few more choices, but there are people putting things in ‘other’ so it’s not the end of the world.
Thanks for the feedback.
January 27th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
[...] the religion and language survey,first written about here, we’ve already got 2800 entries in less than 24 hours. I’d like to leave this open [...]
January 27th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
[...] Michael Kimsal’s weblog » Computer language use and religious affiliation I voted! (They didn’t have a ‘realist’ option, so I added it to ‘other’. Please go and vote too! (tags: programming religion survey) [...]
January 28th, 2008 at 2:03 am
There was no Sikhism
… It is world’s fourth largest religion…
June 1st, 2008 at 8:57 pm
Atheism shouldn’t even be a choice…it’s logically impossible. For one to confidently assert that there is no God requires that they be omniscient–they would have to know everything about the entire universe to be able to factually state that. That would by definition make them God.
If someone wants to call themselves agnostic–not being able to prove the existence of God–then that’s OK.
June 1st, 2008 at 9:04 pm
IH!
For one to confidently assert that there is a God requires that that person be omniscient.
“But it doesn’t! I just need faith!”
OK, then call atheists “people of faith”. It’s a faith that doesn’t require any evidence or belief in a supernatural being though. And an atheist wouldn’t call refer to themself with that label - you might use it to refer to them. Similarly, someone who has a belief in the supernatural (spirits, witches, “Jesus” as the Son of God, fairies, etc.) might consider it a completely normal belief, but an atheist may refer to that person as delusional.
And what’s this? “That would by definition make them God.”
By whose definitions? If someone knew everything about the entire universe (and even beyond) it wouldn’t make them “God”. It would make them someone who knew everything about the universe (and beyond). You need a belief in a God to come up with that definition (a “God” being “omniscient”) in the first place.
Thanks for playing.