The correlation between software engineers and Buddhism by
Ciro Santilli 32 Updated 2024-09-07 Created 1970-01-01
![](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/ID_photo_of_Ciro_Santilli_taken_in_2013.jpg)
Ciro Santilli believes that there is a positive correlation between being a software engineer and liking Buddhist-like things.
Maybe it is linked to minimalism and DRY, which software engineers value so greatly.
Even Ciro had to try an unoriginal Buddhist joke intro in one of this Stack Overflow answers.
Ciro also feels that his "minimal reproducible example" scientific language/concept learning method obsession of breaking things into tiny sub-problems has a strong link with Koans.
Some notable Buddhism/programmer examples:
- www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/ "The Unix Koans of Master Foo - Rootless Root (无根的根)" by the legendary Eric Steven Raymond is notable
- thecodelesscode.com/ "The Codeless Code" by anonymous Qi.
- canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html
- wiki.c2.com/?MysticalProgrammingKoans
- rubykoans.com/ even evil programming languages adopt them!
- The Zen of Python
Another thing that points the correlation out is the existence of wattsalan.github.io/ on a
github.io
about Alan Watts.