What HOLY BLOOD WARS exist in your profession?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

It seems like most of the fields I’m even remotely aware of in any detail have some small blood war, just bubbling below the surface waiting to make best friends and trusted colleagues into bitter enemies at the drop of the hat, at least temporarily. I don’t want serious, technical disagreements – I mean the silly, ultimately inconsequential stuff.

For instance, in programming, one of the greatest blood wars in C-like languages is this:


int main( void ) {
  //code
}

vs


int main( void )
{
  //code
}

Also known as YOUR CURLY BRACE IS ON THE WRONG LINE, FUCKER! Which leads to wonderful arguments about how the former “defeats the concept of a block” and how the latter “disrupts the function definition”, you can see some really bitter arguments for hours over it. There’s also variable notation. Should public variable names start with a Capital and hidden with lowercase? Or maybe we should use sHugarianNotation. Is camelCase okay, or maybe underscored_names are better. ALLCAPS_WITH_UNDERSCORES for constants, or should you stick to the notational conventions used for the rest of the variables in the program? If you ever want to troll a programming board, there’s your ammo.

In Philosophy, I’ve heard that there’s Newcomb’s Paradox. My philosophy friend had five of us in a group and almost fell over when we all agreed (we were all one-boxers). According to him, at philosophy conferences he saw fist fights break out over a discussion of that problem. Twice.

I’ve noticed that a few mathematicians have gotten worked up over the Long vs Short scale numbers (should we use Million, Billion, Trillion, or Million, Millard, Billion, Billard etc)? (Though I’ve only seen at best a mild disagreement over Pi vs Tau)

So what other great blood wars boiling beneath the surface can be unleashed between experts in your field? (And yes, I want experts. While interesting, I’m not particularly interested in your epic struggles with us uninitiated plebians – no Evolutionary Biologists vs The World stuff or Mathematicians vs People Who Say .9999… != 1 stuff).

2

Oh, I like this. Very good question.

In my organization it’s the age old debate of Neutral vs SMART indicators, for example:

Neutral indicator
The number of hectares of high-conservation value forest applying FSC principles.

vs

SMART indicator
15,000 hectares of high-conservation value forest applying FSC principles.

Countless hours have been spent over this extremely important philosophical question. One of my former bosses once mused why it is that monitoring people can’t get along. She figured we should be united by our geekiness if nothing else…

3

vi vs emacs :- 'nuff said.

4

Vs pico vs people who say WHY THE HELL WOULD YOU USE SOMETHING SO UNINTUITIVE?

For the uninitiated, emacs and vi are text editors that, while they can be used for anything, have a lot of tools geared towards programmers. They’re known for having a lot of useful, amazing features, but at the cost of being rather obscure and often unintuitive. In other words, you can do very complicated things to text files with no effort… provided you’re willing to take the time to learn them. The trick comes in that they have somewhat different feature sets and are customized differently – and most importantly the way their crazy key shortcuts work is different. At a basic level Vi requires you to be in a non-text-insertion mode and you generally type something like :<bunch of letters> for a command, for instance, save and quit is “:wq”. Emacs is like a coked up Microsoft Word, its commands are usually some sort series of command key/letter pairs. For instance, save is “ctrl+x” followed by “ctrl+s” and “quit” is “ctrl+x” followed by “ctrl+c”.

Pico is lightweight, and doesn’t have near as many features, not as much Vi or Emacs to be sure, but it works, it’s minimal, and its key commands are generally fairly intuitive. Still others just use something like gedit (think souped up Notepad), which provides a decent amount of features and some customizability, and is pretty intuitive, but a true Vi/Emacs ninja can generally do impressive stuff better and faster than you regardless of how good you are with gedit. (And then there’s users of <x> IDE or editor and so on and so forth).

5

You forgot TECO, where using your own name as a command string became an exercise in what-the-hell-did-I-just-do-to-my-file :wink:

6

One that is hopefully about to end with the new FDA ruling: whether or not to sell Plan B while it’s still available from behind the counter. Some chains still allow individual pharmacists to choose whether or not to stock it, or to not sell it even if it’s carried in-store (where another pharmacist in the same store may have a completely different opinion. My pharmacy has 3 full-time pharmacists, all of whom willingly sell it; many of our “floater” pharmacists, however, refuse, and if they happen to be the head pharmacist on duty at the time, they enforce their preference. There have been a few heated discussions over it at my store, and i imagine it’s much the same at other pharmacies.

Of course, once it goes OTC, dissenting pharmacists may simply deactivate replenishment at store level and simply not carry it on the shelves, so it may continue to be an issue.

7

Organic chemists disagree over:
Dry pack vs slurry pack (how you fill the column with silica gel)
Sand later above silica?
Gravity vs flash (do you let the solvent drop on its own or do you apply pressure?)
Silica height.

There is a bit of a US/Europe split with the last two, with those filthy Europeans* often advocating for overly tall gravity columns.

*:wink: Guess what I think about the matter.

8

Nikon vs Canon

Comments on photo site articles always seem to devolve into this. So stupid. Sony is where it’s at, man!*
*j/k lots of good cameras, lenses, and systems out there. If one works better for your needs or wants, great. Quit flaming other choices.

9

This may sound counter-intuitive, but in my line of work (lawyering) I can’t think of anything that is likely to be as divisive as some of the above examples.

The reason, I think, is that as lawyers, we are trained to always look at the other side of the equation, to think what the other arguments might be; and, there’s always the possibility that some day, we might be arguing the other side for a client. It is by nature a sceptical and agnostic profession (not in the theological sense, but in the “I need to be convinced” sense).

The only area I can think of, offhand, that does generate this type of heat is in labour law, but that’s not so much a dispute about law, as that labour law is one of the most ideological areas. Management lawyers tend to have one ideological mind-set, while union lawyers tend to have a different ideological mind-set, and the legal disputes tend to be a proxy for those clashes of ideology.

10

I’m amused that there are still Mac vs PC flame wars going on. I teach Photoshop, and while the faithful acolytes heap derision on the student next to them for the brand name on their laptop, I get to point out that, thanks to Adobe’s programmers (working harder than anyone in Redmond or Cupertino?)…

… the application’s for the most part identical regardless of platform.

11

Wow, I’m a programmer by training, and have done it professionally, and that seems like the most asinine and idiotic example of nit-picking ever. It ultimately doesn’t matter to the compiler or finished code (and if it does, your compiler sucks)- it’s a stylistic choice on the part of the programmer and nothing really very important.

The biggest items of Jihad in my current career as an IT person and not a programmer is the Microsoft / <something else> fight. There are several theaters of war- server OS, desktop OS, server applications, and desktop applications, with all of them boiling down to Microsoft’s product vs. the competition.

12

Natural or Surrogate primary keys in database table design. I fall in with the surrogate crowd.

13

Secondary education - the knives really come out between departments as to what style we should be teaching the students: APA, MLA, something else. We generally gang up on the English Department and decided “Not what they want.” :stuck_out_tongue:

14

[QUOTE=digs;]
I’m amused that there are still Mac vs PC flame wars going on. I teach Photoshop … the application’s for the most part identical regardless of platform.
[/QUOTE]

Adobe is moving to cloud subscriptions, so it will be identical. But don’t get me started on clouds! Why anyone would be so daft as to put their data out into the uncontrolled wilds of a “cloud” where they don’t know where it is, and there’s no reliable way to know if it really has been deleted, and who has control over it, that’s just asking for trouble.

In my world, there have been minor holy wars over whether CA’s Top Secret is better than IBM’s RACF on mainframes, PowerBroker vs BoKS for *nix servers, and I’m really glad we cured a merged company of their absurd fascination with Novell.

15

All of the computer wars. Ugly Big Endian vs. the Heroic Little Endian, Unix vs. Every Other OS, Unix vs. Linux, One version of Linux vs. Another, Java vs. C vs. Every other Programming Languaue in a Battle Royale, the Endless Battle of the TLAs, IE vs. Firefox vs. Chrome, Mouse vs. Touchpad vs. Trackball, Landscape vs. Portrait, ASCII vs. Unicode16 vs. Unicode32 vs. All the other Variations (the war against EBCDIC is luckily over), PC vs. Mac, Coke vs. Pepsi…

Programmers invented Holy Wars, and create new ones every day, it will never end.

16

Anchor-buoy versus all the other approaches.

In FileMaker, tables are linked relationally to other tables. There can be only one pathway of relational links between any two tables, but to get around this you are allowed to create logical aliases called table occurrences so that Jobs can be directly related to Clients and Contacts to Clients as well, but still allow you to affiliate a Contact record directly to a Task as the contact person on that task by creating a second table occurrence of Contacts, “ContactForTask” or some such thing.

Each layout (screens) is native to a specific table occurrence.

Anchor-buoy is a design philosophy whereby for each table occurrence you plop it onto the relationship diagram and string all the directly related tables to its right, then any related to those tables to their right, so you end up with a whole bunch of octopus-shaped relationship arrays, each with a head on the left. The heads usually have simple names like Clients or Jobs or Contacts or Tasks, then the names get more cumbersome as you move right: Clients_to_Jobs, Clients_to_Contacts, etc; then Clients_to_Jobs_to_Tasks, Clients_to_Contacts_to_Assigned__Tasks and so on in the next tier. There’s a lot of redundancy since in the table occurrence group where Jobs is on the left you’ll have a relationship to Jobs_to_Clients based on the exact same field matchups as the relationship between Clients and Clients_to_Jobs. Many A/B developers use additional naming conventions to indicate not only what table is related to what but according to which types of key fields.

example

The contrasting approaches don’t start off with a unique “home” table occurrence for each table; instead if you’ve got a Clients table and a Jobs table you put them on the graph once and read from left to right or right to left, doesn’t matter, you don’t use those hierarchical naming conventions and instead tend to use simple names and unless you’re working in a fairly complex system you will probably only have the one group instead of multiple table occurrence groups, with all your tables arranged in a sort of boxy ring.

example

The anchor-buoy developers complaining about non-AB systems when they inherit them: “I can’t tell from the name how the tables are linked to anything else! And in large complex systems I can spend half an hour looking for it on the graph because it could be ANYWHERE!”

Non-AB developers complaining about anchor-buoy systems when we have to work in them: “Yeesh, honestly, you had to name it ‘T05b_contacts_ACCOUNTS||id_account|’?? That makes my eyes hurt!”

17

Well, some libraries are going to BISAC headings, which makes me incredibly stabby - browsable but not findable!

18

There is, still? I remember, back in the early 90s, my Microsoft software developing client was all ‘hahaha, you Mac guys are soooo screwed, Apple will be bust by the end of the year’.

Ha.

Ha.

I’m just relieved the mighty Quark/InDesign War is over, even if it meant me jumping ship half way through. Was touch and go for a while back there.

19

Could someone let me know what “Plan B” is, and why there’s a controversy surrounding it(whatever it is?)

20

Morning After Pill. The controversy is regarding whether minors should be able to buy it over the counter.