Theology meets data structures

Jeff (aka @eaton) and Larry (aka @TheRealCrell) are two truly nifty and interesting people I've met as a result of being on the fringes of the Drupal community. I've been watching this exchange scroll by on Twitter with a mix of admiration, amusement, and need for aspirin. Will be completely impenetrable and boring to anyone who isn't either 1) fascinated with religion or 2) fascinated with programming structures.

eaton: Sheol is the difficult to optimize edge case of Protestant theology.
TheRealCrell: @eaton It's an edge case, so you just need to lazy-load it when needed. Otherwise, don't worry about it.
eaton: @TheRealCrell "Theology 6.12. Fixed: Stack overflow when using reflection to retrieve properties of the Trinity class."
eaton: @TheRealCrell Actually, I'm pretty sure that the Trinity would be duck typing. Hmm. Crap, now I'm writing a blog post...
TheRealCrell: @eaton It's just three separate interfaces to the same object. class God implements FatherInterface, SonInterface, HolyGhostInterface {}
eaton: @TheRealCrell According to non-Trinitarian traditions, though, it's encapsulation...
eaton: Yes, @therealcrell and I are THAT nerdy.
TheRealCrell: @eaton That's the beauty of interfaces. Which of them it extends or composes is encapsulated, and is even implementation dependent.
TheRealCrell: @eaton Although technically ChristianGod extends Yahweh implements PaganTraditionsInterface, GenericMidEastGodInterface {}
eaton: @TheRealCrell Tell that to the Seventh Day Adventists! *rimshot* Ehh... Hm.
TheRealCrell: @eaton unset($heathens);
eaton: @TheRealCrell Careful. $heathens is a global that's used as a pointer to random data, depending on the context.
TheRealCrell: @eaton Yet another reason for proper encapsulation of religion rather than letting it become global. #smallreligion

(For those of you who aren't in the Drupal community, the #smallreligion hashtag is a poke at Jeff Eaton's championing of an idea in Drupal known as #smallcore.  That's all you need to know.  Nod and move on.)

Comments

LOL and ROFL seem insufficient to express my mirth at this one.

class God implements...  *chortle*

Normally I don't repost stuff like this, but I hated the thought of it just vanishing into the ether.

The conversation then continued in IRC, where we determined that class Yahweh itself extends Zeus, and Mithra would require mixins to implement properly.  We also decided religion was a source-code-based language subject to run-time interpretation, although not all religions had a reference implementation.

Insert your own joke here.

Exhibit A in why I have every intention of maneuvering you, merlin, esmerel, and eaton to have dinner with me in SF. Mostly so I can sit back and giggle into my wine for two hours.

Sounds like deja vu from Paris. What crazy video do you plan to make this time?