I worked 6 years embedded programming on SHARC(blackfin) Procs... So I do know !:) even then you use libraries written by others and lots of legacy / inherited code .. Having said that my point is that I'd like to see any common mortal debug all the way down to that level today !!! If you are working in ASP.NET 4.0 or ADO your mental stack overflows much faster than VS or JSP to Java. The isolation OSes provide and the complexity and diversity of the technology leave so much unknown that it greys out and fades to black the more abstract the type of work you are doing. Think writing apps for sharepoint (which I do today for a living) there so much undocumented I feel it's going on faith more than understanding ...

I fully Agree!!

How science do we actually meet in everyday life.. technology is becoming closer to magic than science. For the man on the street there is little or no difference. I Arthur C Clarke again any sufficiently advanced form of tech is indistinguishable from magic ... I mean even us programmers.. we are so isolated from the hardware and the networks that there is little we usually understand it goes like : that's the DB guy's job or that's the SAN guy call the storage group or now that's the Cloud. The logic in religion held strong for 2000 years thinking "You're bad God gives gives you disabled children, sickness or if you're gay you die of some weird disease". I do not agree fully with the blog here: http://blog.aimonger.com/ but I think he makes a point. nice other article here too http://blog.aimonger.com/2010/10/11/the-beauty-of-beauty/ But they are too long. Wish I had time to read longer articles, they just are not so shallow but take time , lucky this is the lounge .. a break is a break after all !!

religion gave us Back Leonardo and funnily enough gagileo.. ( besides the middle ages, plague and most cases of terrorism) good and bad I suppose. science gave us the atom bomb

till some years ago neutrinos were undetectable ( only theoretic) and till now the higgs is ... SO point still open.

Science is based on doubt as opposed to wishful thinking aka faith. Discovery and news is, most of the time, published and exposed to peer review. Disprove is valued as much as proof. Disagreeing views are valued and prefered to monotonic knowledge anagonism is fostered and useful. Proof and empirical observation are pinions of most of the finidngs of science. Experimentation is necessary not evil. There are NO Dogmas everything is always in question but not all questions are equal. It is based around reproducability freak measurements are not looked at as divine interventions more like human failure. It takes human flaws and eliminates them as much as possible from all experiments. It does not assume a pious or arbitrary position on facts. It assumes it is wrong to start with. The blog covers it but it explains the parallels too.

Came across a cool site for those long chilllout discussions in the breaks. http://blog.aimonger.com/2010/12/13/is-science-just-a-new-religion/ I know it's not programming but since I get lot's of interesting non related links from the lounge might as well share back :-O . njoy..