[from Usenet, but may predate it; common]
n. flame wars
over religious issues. The paper by Danny Cohen
that popularized the terms big-endian and
little-endian in connection with the
LSB-first/MSB-first controversy was entitled On Holy Wars and a
Plea for Peace.
Great holy wars of the past have included ITS
vs.: Unix, Unix vs.:
VMS, BSD Unix vs.: System V,
C vs.: Pascal,
C vs.: FORTRAN, etc. In the year 2003, popular
favorites of the day are KDE vs, GNOME, vim vs. elvis, Linux
vs. [Free|Net|Open]BSD. Hardy perennials include
EMACS vs.: vi, my personal
computer vs.: everyone else's personal computer, ad nauseam. The
characteristic that distinguishes holy wars from normal technical disputes
is that in a holy war most of the participants spend their time trying to
pass off personal value choices and cultural attachments as objective
technical evaluations. This happens precisely because in a true holy war,
the actual substantive differences between the sides are relatively minor.
See also theology.
