Hahaha. But wouldn’t He have to be a quantum programmer?

http://lispers.org/

“The language God would have used to implement the Universe.” — Svein Ove Aas

“Programming in Lisp is like playing with the primordial forces of the universe. It feels like lightning between your fingertips. No other language even feels close.” — Glenn Ehrlich

http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/eternal-flame.html

“And God wrote in Lisp code
Every creature great and small.
Don’t search the disk drive for man.c,
When the listing’s on the wall.
And when I watch the lightning burn
Unbelievers to a crisp,
I know God had six days to work,
So he wrote it all in Lisp.

Yes, God had a deadline.
So he wrote it all in Lisp.”

Actually God wrote everything in Lisp, which is evident because we can easily examine the code, data structures and at least the bytecode of the very existence of everything.

(Okay, according to Roman Catholic tradition He wrote in Haskell, and Protestants insist it’s Common Lisp, and some radical offshoots suggest OCaml or even Scheme, but at least no one’s claiming anything else besides functional programming languages.)

As for Mr. Gates – since he *is* funding the Discovery Institute, to the tune of almost $10 million, he deserves all the bad press he can get. He’s certainly had enough previous experience with negative publicity to know what funding them entails, no matter what the overt objective may be given as.

NASA have a space on Sourceforge for their source files: http://sourceforge.net/projects/nasa-exp

Its definatly the future. Huzzah to Nasa.

Larry

And JWK, I can appreciate your exuberance, but the Gates Foundation does NOT support IDism. Don’t let your rational disgust over abuses of the US system of Capitalism perpetrated by Billy boy obscure the research into humane and efficacious Education for our kids.

The man is certainly a bigger marketing geek than a good programmer or benevolent (Hahaha!) businessman. But everything I’ve ever read strongly suggests that he knows the difference between science and creationism. And funds the former, not the latter.

Anyway, decide for yourself after checkin’ their site. Creationists don’t support more effective AIDS vaccines either.

As to God and open-source, any educated Christian (as opposed to a knuckle-walker like George Deutsch) knows that God has, in fact, left His source open. That’s the whole point of science.

And, in the long run, that’s the whole point of freedom, too.

If God were a programmer, would He write OSS? I think not!

It’s a group with the deceptive name “Discovery Institute”. Of course, as soon as the story broke, the B&MG Foundation immediately announced that, of course, the money was earmarked for something completely different, nothing to do with creationism at all, no, not one bit, not at all….

After Microsoft’s categorical denial in early 1991 of a story in the “Wall Street Journal” that they were going to drop support of OS/2 and replace it with a new product to be called “Windows NT”, I think I know how much to trust that.

(BTW, hope you’re enjoying this cruddy, cloudy weather in Houston.

http://www.astroseti.org/impacts.php

Open Source is not a license, it’s a model. The models are codified in the various licenses. The model is based (as all models are) on a philosophical framework. You’re right that it’s not a religion, but I don’t see who you’re correcting on this–no one has spouted off in a religious fashion about open source here.

Whether one has the skill and commitment applies equally well to closed source as it does to open source.

There is really no downside for NASA to open source the software it has which is of interest to others. It’s really quite good that NASA is doing this.

There are countless advantages to using open-source software, even for non-techies. Possibly the best reason to choose OSS is because the people who programmed it put their reputation at risk. They care about the quality of the code, not the money earned from it.

Simply being able to write in a book in a Public Library does not automatically make you a good author.

To take full advantage of Open Source, which IMHO is simply a licence and not the religion some proponents present it as, you need good programming skills and the ability to ‘stay the course’ until your project is complete.