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Religion and computer language use survey results (kimsal.com)
13 points by mqt on Feb 17, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments



The religions by language breakdown is not terribly revealing, but the opposite, languages by religion, is very interesting.

Atheist like Python, C, C++ and Java. A very practical toolkit. Most of the major large religions, Christian, Muslim and Hindu also seem to favour widely used languages. Buddhist ranks Lisp very highly. Jewish coders like web languages like PHP, Perl and Javascript. Pagan's must all be running Apache servers, because Perl, PHP and Python dominate. Unitarians, true to there reputation, go for an eclectic mix that includes oddities like Groovy, D and LOGO. I think people's deepest held beliefs about how the world works does seem to lead them towards certain languages more than others.


An interesting series to look at is: Haskell, OCaml, Scheme, Lisp, C, C++, Java, Perl, PHP, Visual Basic, VB.Net.

The progression is from heavily Atheist/Agnostic to heavily religious.


The easy explanation is to say atheists are smarter. However, this ignores the societal implications of atheism and religiousness.

I think atheism is more the philosophy of the self sufficient than the non self sufficient. So, people who would be atheists if they had the means end up not being atheists when they do not (at least in the general case). However, the converse is not true of being religious. Therefore, the religious label can encompass a wider range of people.


While it would be interesting, my quick glance through the list showed there to be very little difference between the religions. Yes, atheists prefer Python while Catholics prefer C, but the difference is really quite minimal. My guess is the differences are not statistically significant. I would run the numbers but at the moment I'm feeling lazy. Just like every other moment.


So the only conclusion we can make is a lot of atheists took the survey?


I thought computer language WAS religion.




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