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Stack OverflowWhat are the programming religious wars of the generations before our current generation?
[+34] [17] Christopher Altman
[2010-04-15 13:52:36]
[ language-agnostic ]
[ http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2645860/what-are-the-programming-religious-wars-of-the-generations-before-our-current-ge ] [DELETED]

Being 32 years old, I did not follow debates in programming, language design, and platforms in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and most of the 1990s. I sometimes hear glimpse of what the major debates were and how they turned the course of history. It makes me wonder what I take for granted.

I am curious, what were the debates. The ones I know are:

(8) Odd, I didn't find this question that obnoxious. And look, wiki! - Will
@Will: Making an offtopic question CW does not make it acceptable. Though in this case I agree with you that the question doesn't deserve to be closed. - Billy ONeal
(16) A note to everyone who wants to close it: this question is not about starting any flamewar. The question is about history of our beloved domain. I think such question is completely legitimate. - Pavel Shved
(1) @Pavel: It's arguably off-topic, and is a bit on the subjective side. It's a borderline case, and may wind up being closed and reopened more than once. - David Thornley
(7) Completely disagree with closing this. Unfortunately we mere mortals don't have the rep to disagree with the mightly admins. - stusmith
(3) @stusmith: The difference between us, for practical purposes, is that I have enough rep to vote to open and close, and you're 100 short. You could get to 3K with a few good answers. There are moderators, but they haven't done anything with this question (no diamonds on the close notice). - David Thornley
@all: if you don't want to see questions like this, tag as subjective and add the subjective tag to your ignore list. Please don't spoil SO for the rest of us who are interested in this question. - Juliet
[+27] [2010-04-15 14:00:41] Alex Martelli

The biggest war was about the GOTO [1] statement, ignited by Djikstra's "Goto considered harmful" [2] letter [3] in March 1968 and masterfully capped by Knuth's "Structured programming with Goto statements" [4] (PDF) essay in December 1974 (of course some people are still debating, but you can usually tell they haven't read Knuth's wonderful essay -- or haven't understood it at all;-). That war can be seen as part of the larger one about structured programming [5] (which is why Knuth's essay's title is so perfect;-).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goto
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful
[3] http://www.u.arizona.edu/~rubinson/copyright_violations/Go_To_Considered_Harmful.html
[4] http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=356640&type=pdf&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=84382905&CFTOKEN=21198857
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structured_programming

(1) I think you meant 'goto' instead of 'gogo', huh? - Johannes Rudolph
(5) Gogo statements? Interesting concept you have there ;) - Alex Budovski
(1) I liked the humor in Frank Rubin's paper titled 'GOTO Considered Harmful' Considered Harmful :) - Onion-Knight
(1) And then there's "Considered Harmful" Essays Considered Harmful. - Jonathan Leffler
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[+23] [2010-04-15 13:56:54] clyfe

Editor wars: vi vs emacs


(8) this is still ongoing - rmeador
(3) @rmeador: but we won! - Joachim Sauer
(2) No you didn't, WE won. - AShelly
vim is the one true editor! - regality
ha people playing with their toys; real programmers use echo >! - Hawken
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[+14] [2010-04-15 14:05:46] IVlad

The Tanenbaum-Torvalds debate [1].

[1] http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/appa.html

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[+8] [2010-04-15 13:58:34] GreenMatt

While I am not old enough to remember it, Dijkstra [1]'s Go To Statement Considered Harmful [2] was controversial.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra
[2] http://userweb.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd02xx/EWD215.PDF

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[+8] [2010-04-15 14:05:57] High Performance Mark

I can't remember the name of the war, but Fortran won, and it's still winning.


I take the downvote as evidence that while Fortran is still winning there remain pockets of resistance. Come on, you know it's futile. - High Performance Mark
+1 for humor sake - dkackman
I think Fortran is actually a little more efficient than C if I remember correctly; though not by much. - Hawken
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[+8] [2010-04-15 14:39:33] user317600

RISC vs. CISC
Big-endian vs. Little-endian
Goto vs. ComeFrom :-)


(1) +1 for RISC vs. CISC - uncle brad
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[+8] [2010-04-15 14:54:15] David Thornley [ACCEPTED]

Integer representation: twos' complement (which won), ones' complement (on the Control Data Cyber series, first computers I programmed in assembler on), and signed magnitude (immortalized in the MIX machine in volume 1 of Knuth).

Whether computer languages should be natural-sounding (like COBOL) or more formal (like FORTRAN or ALGOL or LISP).

I could mention the mainframe vs. minicomputer wars, and the IT department vs. personal computers, but the centralization vs. decentralization struggle is going on now with personal computers and local servers vs. "the cloud". So far, decentralization has won every round, and we'll see if SaaS and cloud apps can offer comparably more business functionality in the way increasingly smaller computers did.


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[+8] [2010-04-15 14:58:07] MPelletier

OOP versus ... the world, really.


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[+4] [2010-04-15 13:59:03] MadKeithV

As far as I'm concerned, the procedural vs. object-oriented war is still going, or at least should be :)


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[+2] [2010-04-15 13:59:49] Adam Crossland

This probably only counts as a border skirmish, but I'm a sucker for anything involving RMS spouting off, so I'll nominate The Tcl War [1].

[1] http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/

(1) The only problem with it is that people keep citing it in a non-historical way. - Donal Fellows
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[+2] [2010-04-15 14:18:41] mafutrct

Indentation and bracket placement?


(1) That's still going as strong as when I first started programming, back in the 1960s. - David Thornley
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[+2] [2010-04-18 02:28:25] David Plumpton

Going back a long while the word size was far from obvious. The IBM 360 chose 8 bit bytes, which was controversial (wasting two bits per byte!).

6502 vs Z80 in micros for many years.

Whether microcomputers were good for anything (mainframe and minicomputer folks assumed personal computers would be useless toys forever).

For many businesses a big decision was whether to go totally IBM or consider an alternative. General purpose computing vs specialized hardware (e.g. when designing a telephone network switch should it be custom hardware or off the shelf components?)

Fail fast versus tolerant computing (e.g. do you leave asserts enabled when your guiding the space shuttle through re-entry).

Ye olden days were just as full of uncertainty, confusion and debate as there are now (unless you were and IBM salesman, of course).


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[+1] [2010-04-15 13:59:30] Little Bobby Tables
  • Structured vs. Unstructured programming (see Dijkstra "goto statement considered harmful")
  • PC vs. Mainframe
  • Shared-state concurrency vs. Asynchronous messages (started at the '70s, still going)

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[+1] [2010-04-15 15:00:23] Dan Diplo

When I was growing up in UK it was...

ZX Spectrum [1] (Z80A) vs Commodore 64 [2] (6510, a modified 6502)

CP/M [3] vs DOS [4]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS

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[+1] [2010-04-15 15:54:03] Michael Dorgan

Amiga vs IBM/PCs Similiar to Apple vs IBM today.

Commodore vs everything else :)


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[+1] [2010-04-18 02:33:59] Kevin

Centralized Servers vs Distributed Computing

(Technically, this is still going on. It's just the marketing people keep changing the name.)


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[0] [2010-04-18 03:40:38] James M.

Representing non-integral numbers (fixed point vs. floating point, exponent size vs. significand size, sign bit or complement, etc.) have been debated for a long time. Maybe this doesn't count as "previous generation" because debates continue, but I would say it was mostly settled with IEEE 754 and widespread adoption in hardware within the last 20 years.


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