Beliefs and Programming

I don't post too often on here these days. I've moved to blogging with my current employer, Compendium Blogware. You can find new posts here. Occasionally though, there is a post that doesn't quite belong or isn't quite appropriate for the corporate world. This is one of those posts. Michael Kimsal put together a survey called Religious affiliation and software development languages, which you can also discuss on his blog here. I downloaded the data set and made the following further analysis:

• Found the top 25 languages by the number of people who filled out the survey
• Found the top 5 religious affiliations for each language
• I normalized all Christian religions into the affiliation 'Christianity'
• I grouped agnostic and atheist declarations into 'AA'

Given that only ~3815 people took the survey, not a whole lot could be drawn from the numbers. However, here is what I found, draw your own conclusions.

• The top 10 languages in order were: Python, C, C++, Java, Javascript, Ruby, PHP, Lisp, Perl, Haskell
• The top two affiliate declarations were: AA (Atheist,Agnostic), Christian. After that Buddhist was most common.
• Without normalization, the top declarations where Atheism followed by Agnostic followed by some variety of Christianity.

I'm not sure what the target group was. I didn't even know about the survey until after it was closed. However, I would say the results are inline with what I have observed in my own geeky social circles. Analytical people tend to question doctrine.