Religion is More than the Supernatural

Most developers are religious about technology

It’s true.

Don’t be ashamed, you are not alone.  Myself, and just about everyone else, is with you.

Some of use are recovering from our self-imposed brain washing.  Others of us are blissfully unaware of our predicament.  But most of us have at least one religion we’ve managed to craft ourselves.

It is perfectly natural because most programmers got into the field of software development because they were passionate about it.  Anything you are passionate about is likely to cause you to develop some highly charged opinions.

Take sports fans for instance.  I’m not really much of a sports fan myself, but I know many fans of all different kinds of sports that religiously believe their team is the best despite all the evidence to the contrary.

This defense of our own choices and ideas is core to human nature.  It is easy for us to adopt a new idea but we religiously defend the ones we have without needing much evidence to back it up.The problem is we tend to tie up our ideas about things with our identity and even our value as human beings.

It takes some deep soul searching, but it you look within yourself you’ll probably find that you can make a list of the best operating systems, programming languages, frameworks and so on.

Ignorance is not bliss

The problem with this self-imposed religion is that our technological religion blinds us from the truth.

I spent countless hours arguing about why Macs sucked so much before I had even really used one.  Ironically, I am writing this post on a Mac right now, but I am using Windows Live Writer which I am accessing through remote desktop.  Oh, and this blog post, well, it is actually hosted on an Ubuntu Linux server in the cloud on a PHP application you may have heard of called WordPress.

My point is, most of us vehemently will argue that our technology choice is the best without even having really tried the alternatives.

It seems ludicrous when you think about it clearly, but I still catch myself doing it even today.

When I look within myself to honestly ask the question “why,” I find that most of my motivations come from a combination of pride in what I have learned and accomplished and a fear of what I don’t know.

I find that it is much easier to dismiss a technology that I don’t know as “garbage” or “worthless” than it is to take the time to learn about it and see why others like it so much.  As they say, one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure.

Programmers are religious about their technology choices. What other biases are we religious about?