Religion in Software 

Anyone who has been in the software industry for long enough will encounter more than their fair share of religions. They are everywhere, and the evangelists are easy to spot, and are very loud. I'm not talking about Christianity, or Islam, or the like... though the arguments between members of the various sects of software religions can be just as intense, if not more so. There are several different areas of discussion that always seem to create religions.

When you talk about operating systems especially, people are very fierce and very loyal to their choice. You have the Windows evangelists who bow down to the Bill Gates god. You have the people who have used a Mac forever, from when Jobs started it, to when Jobs left, to when he came back. You have the Linux enthusiasts (who even argue over how to pronounce Linux). They're sometimes the worst since there are so many flavors of Linux... like trying to debate the merits of being a Baptist vs. being a Methodist. Then you have those wackos (the Jehovah's Witnesses of the world) who will always use BSD... until the day they die. Of course they're sneaky too... since Mac OSX is really Free BSD under the hood. They converted a whole bunch of people, and most don't even know it.

Operating systems aren't the only areas of religious interest of course. Start talking about databases, and you get an entirely different group of people. You have the Microsofties again... they're absolutely everywhere you know. They will debate the merits of SQL Server until you don't want to hear them any more (*cough* Chuck). Every now and then you'll hear about the people who live and die by Oracle (though they keep pretty much to themselves). Oracle is an expensive religion to believe in... sort of like being Catholic. You have to constantly put your money in the plate. Then you get the real serious open source guys... who will talk at you about MySQL or even better... Postgres SQL until you can't stand to be by them. To it's credit, I've used Postgres SQL before... and it just works. There is a lot to be said for "It just works"... but that's for a different post.

You have the people who get very serious when talking about computer languages. They'll debate the merits of Java, C, C++, C#, Visual Basic, Delphi, Perl, or any other language you can think up (and there are a lot more than what I've mentioned here). I'll admit that I will try to convince a Visual Basic programmer about the wonder that is C++ or C# any day. But then again, I've also used more languages than I can count on my fingers... so I don't limit myself either.

When you get down to brass tacks however, being a religious software advocate is a really poor thing to do. I much prefer to be agnostic over my software choices. The simple fact is that the software you use to create something is not the goal. Software is just a medium to get somewhere else. People who get deeply religious about their software tend to be more excited about how they're going to do something, and not about what they're trying to accomplish. And while being excited about how you do something is important, the real goal is to create a product to do something. Your users aren't going to care whether it was written in Java, or using C#, or VB.NET, or whether it connects to an Oracle or MS SQL database, as long as it does what they want it to do, and does it well. So if you're in software... learn to read many bibles, and even listen to many evangelists. But at the end of the day, don't let them get their hooks into you. You want to make something.