Blogging Roller

Dave Johnson on open web technologies, social software and software development

Godless hackers

Michael Kimsal did an informal survey of computer language use and religion on his blog a couple of weeks ago. The results don't seem very surprising to me. Like Alan Turing, Linus Torvolds and Richard Stallman, most developers are either atheists or agnostics.

Here's Michael's pie chart for Java:

<img src="http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/resource/godlesshackers.jpg" alt="pie chart showing half of Java developers are atheists" />
Dave Johnson in General • 🕒 05:52AM Feb 18, 2008
Comments:

There are no atheists in QA

Posted by James Snell on February 18, 2008 at 02:30 PM EST #

1. they didnt seem to include Emacs and VI in the list of religions; maybe the atheists felt their deities were omitted 2. I'm amused by the prolog results: http://www.kimsal.com/reldevsurvey/results.php?action=byLanguage&language=74#relbylang The Catholic church is there in #2. It could be an artifact of sample size, or it could be the notion of closed world truth (if it does not exist, it is false) appeals :)

Posted by Steve Loughran on February 18, 2008 at 02:40 PM EST #

Programmers tend to analyse the world we live, in terms of bits and bytes, zeros and ones which can easily lead them to conclude that belief in God is not mandate in leading a "good" life. This will make them agnostic and if they have the time to think beyond this, they turn atheists.

Posted by Sean Cleetus on February 19, 2008 at 01:25 AM EST #

Interesting to have split Christianity up into 4 little pieces. What do you suppose the Buddhism break-up is between Vajrayana, Therevada, Zen and others?

Posted by Mad William Flint on February 19, 2008 at 01:17 PM EST #

Post a Comment:
  • HTML Syntax: NOT allowed