The Biggest Cults In Tech

bobby f. writes "Infoworld has published its list of the biggest cults in tech — including Palmists, Newtonians, Commodorians, the Brotherhood of the Ruby, IBM power systems fanboys, Ubuntu-ists, and Lispers. A pretty fun read (unless you really are a cult member)." Although I think it's pretty clear that the Apple camp isn't an opinionated cult, they're just always right. Fire away.

Perl?

[quickOnTheUptake]

What about Perl? Seems a lot more cultish (in a good way) to me than Ubuntu or RoR.

Amiga

[PowerEdge]

In an earlier stage of life I worked at RadioShack, when they actually sold electronics and radio equipment. One of my co-workers was a ham radio enthusiast and would spend hours talking about the rise of the Amiga and how it would come back. It was always just a few months away from releasing a new OS or platform. I would wager if I went back to that store... Or perhaps the store that replaced it, since RadioShack is just a shell of its former self he would still extoll the virtues of Amiga and it's imminent resurgence. Then he'd mutter about how Gateway killed it because the technology was too advanced for the average PC user to accept.

Oracle DBAs

[jimjamjoh]

Anyone who's ever worked in an org w/ full-time Oracle DBAs can attest to how fanatical they are in allegiance to Oracle, even to the point of ruin.

And it's funny, too, because you think they're interested in databases, relational concepts, data integrity, and all of this in general, but they're not, they interested in Oracle products, period. They'd quit before they managed a SQL Server or PostgreSQL database for you.

Cultists.

C= 8-bitters instead of the Amiga?!

[Cajun Hell]

C'mon, the Commodore 8-bit machines had some enthusiasts but are nowhere nearly the in same league of cultism as the Amiga. And I should know, as an ex-Amiga cultist. That was a beautiful platform, and it was really hard to work with one and not get your mind warped with the belief that it could come back and start kicking asses. C64/C128 so-called "cultists" might get a little excited about some anachronistic development, decades after the platforms' prime, but I don't remember any religious fervor that the C64 was going to put Microsoft in its grave. For that you need an Amiga believer.

Re:Amiga

[Allicorn]

Eric Schwartz's terrific little animated music video about Amiga accompanied by the "Still Alive" song from Portal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mg6wrYCT9Q [youtube.com]

BeOS left off?

[Jeremi]

I am a high priest in the cult of BeOS, and I am frankly incensed that fine operating system was not included in the list.

I strongly suspect that Microsoft strong-armed the authors of the article to keep BeOS off the list, in order to maintain their monopoly.

Thank you.

Best Cult

[maz2331]

The cult of Pragmatism:

Name: Pragmatics
Established: Time Immemorial
Gathering of the Tribe: Anyplace shit has to work.
Major Deity: It Works
Sacred Relic: It Works
The Antichrist: Shit That Doesn't Fucking Work.

Re:Cult #1

[vlm]

Name: cult of debian
Established: 1993
Major Deity(s): Bruce Perens & people called Ian
Sacred relic: Debian 1.0 discs
Antichrist: ubuntu

Bzzzt fail.

I was "around" back then (although I didn't join until a couple years later) and the 1.0 disks were an epic fail. Not a sacred relic at all. If anything, the opposite of a sacred relic...

Check out:
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ch-releases.en.html [debian.org]

Debian 1.0 was never released: Accidently InfoMagic, a CD vendor, shipped the development release of Debian and entitled it 1.0. On December 11th 1995, Debian and InfoMagic jointly announced that this release was screwed. Bruce Perens explains that the data placed on the "InfoMagic Linux Developer's Resource 5-CD Set November 1995" as "Debian 1.0" is not the Debian 1.0 release, but an early development version which is only partially in the ELF format, will probably not boot or run correctly, and does not represent the quality of a released Debian system. To prevent confusion between the premature CD version and the actual Debian release, the Debian Project has renamed its next release to "Debian 1.1". The premature Debian 1.0 on CD is deprecated and should not be used.

Also if anything would be Debian's "antichrist" it would be Debian's own non-free repository of software with licenses too icky to be in the real "main" Debian. The fact that I like the devilish non-free repository probably means I listened to too much heavy metal in the 80s.

Re:Cult #1

[mdwh2]

I like my modern computers, and I run Windows on them, so I guess you could say I like Windows. Plenty of people do - just because we don't get fanatically about it doesn't mean we don't like it.

For a while, I viewed Windows as very much a "least worst", but that just means the other offerings are even worse. But since 2000, I have to say it's a decent OS (based on the robust NT line, but capable of running consumer applications). Computing in the late 90s was terrible, as all the choices were dire, but I have to say that now, computing is fun again. There are still a few things that annoy me about Windows, and it's a shame that there isn't a mainstream descendant of a decent platform like AmigaOS, but the other mainstream alternatives annoy me far more than Windows.

So yes, I'll say it, I like Windows. And I've tried plenty of operating systems in my time. I used to hate it, but ironically the poor offerings from the alternatives that survived, and the vast improvement over the NT line of DOS/9x, mean that things are different now.