Here is my favorite Bible verse related to programming. I subtitle it, "God, calling a function."

"So shall My word be that goes forth from My mouth; it shall not return to me void, but it shall accomplish what I please, and it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it." -- Isaiah 55:11 (NKJV)

Surely it's Romans 11:36: "All things come from God, through God, and return to God." As we can see, God does not use continuation-passing style.

God: The Ultimate Imperative.

Iunno, not having a 'void' return type sounds pretty functional to me.

Programming is very spiritual. You start out with nothing but a void and then call things into being with nothing but words.

Timely wisdom....

"In view of this, it is ironic that introductory programming is most often taught in a highly imperative style. This may be a memorial unto the children of whoredoms."

http://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/post/75266347899/in-v...

It's like reading the ramblings of a drunk and deeply Christian contemporary of the Unix guys.

The author has provided more info on the blog in response to questions:

http://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/tagged/ask

TempleOS anyone?

This was my first thought as well. In TempleOS there's a game where you can go up to the top of Mt Sinai and have a "prophecy" delivered to you which is mostly a bunch of pseudo-random garble. Would be cool to have it use a markov chain generator akin to this.

This leads me to the thought that we need to define KJPL and implement a front-end for LLVM. OK, maybe not need ...

This is brilliant not because it is funny (at times) but because it gets to a deeper link between programming, literacy and sprituality.

This stuff matters.

Really? This is getting toward a deeper link? I don't know about that.

Yes, language encodes thought patterns and affects them too.

The software languages we use affect our thinking as much as the spoken languages we use, and to juxtapose the two simply emphasises how closely linked are our notions of spirituality and language used to describe it. calling out the spiritual and throwing the secular world of programming into the same sentence just makes me reconsider which is the driver and which the driven.

> "I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and the first variable"

Wouldn't that be "... and the first constant"? ;-)

"Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you representational state transfer" -- Matthew 11:28

This was mentioned in Cognicast Episode 50 [1]

[1] http://thinkrelevance.com/blog/2014/02/25/luke-vanderhart-an...

I was thoroughly confused when initial reading the title. I thought Lebron James had started experimenting with programming along with his teammate Chris Bosh [1].

[1] - http://code.org/promote

I'm trying to figure out what I'm looking at. A quick look at what Markov Chains are doesn't really seem to explain it. This is a mashup of these two books, basically, correct?

Yep. You're building a statistical model of a corpus of text. Given an ordered set of words, it tells you what's likely to come next. e.g,

  [it, is] -> {sunny, 0.75}
  
  [it, is] -> {raining, 0.25}

Tells you that given the phrase "it is", what comes next was "sunny" 3/4 of the time, and "raining" the rest.

Once you've got that, you can use it to generate random text that has similar characteristics to the training corpus. You just seed it with a couple starting words, and then start randomly choosing what word comes next according to the probabilities you've recorded.

jwz's got one that you can play with yourself at http://www.jwz.org/dadadodo/

Yes, it's basically a mashups of the two books. Each successive word is chosen randomly in proportion to how often in appears following the two or so words preceding it in the combined text.

Randomly generated and manually culled, yes.

Jesus wept.

Am I the only one that was hoping this was LeBron?

Same here.

Wow, for some reason mashups like this make me feel distinctly weird, like two vegetables or organisms were weirdly mashed together..

God is Real, unless declared Integer.

FORTRAN, right?

yep

Yay, my university is in the news! :D

makes as much sense as the bible

./configure; make; make believe

--john 3:16