Monday, April 8, 2013

Hail Knuth

After committing some very bad programming sins I felt bad enough to confess them to a fellow developer. After hearing my confession he compelled me to say 100 "Hail Knuths", and to sin no more.

Hail Knuth, full of experience, the source is with thee; blessed art thou amongst software engineers, and blessed is the fruit of thy methodologies, common sense.
Holy Knuth, Father of Design, pray for us hackers, now and at the hour of our death march. Amen.


I also found it lifted my spirits to say this when faced with a horrible list of bugs in really bad code:

Yea, thou I walk through the endless call stack of death, I will fear no bugs; for I understand system design and I know that this is not my fault and I already have my resume online.
Amen


I have several of these passages that I wrote from taking bible versus and switching the the subject matter to programming. I have hesitated to post them from fear of it being construed as some type of disrespect towards Christianity. Nothing could be farther from the truth as I am a practicing Christian myself.

I also thought it might not be a good thing to mix religion and computer science together. Not that I am ashamed of my faith at all but because its so nice to have an outlet where religion is not a topic. I think its funny how much ideology is involved in software development. We hold what some people say as almost biblical. Arguing with Knuth is probably as close to blasphemy as you can get in the programming world.


1 comment:

  1. Please, for the good of all of us, post the rest of the verses.

    ReplyDelete