Wednesday, July 06, 2005

Why Yoga and Unix?

One of the things I enjoy the most are unifying theories or principles, and naturally things that derive from unified, simplified or synthetic concepts.
After being raised a catholic christian, studying Buddhism, being exposed to spiritism, having a glimpse of Taoism and Zen-Buddhism, going a bit christian again with the luteran church and then falling in love with Discordianism, I stumbled upon Yoga (Raja Yoga, not the body-stretching-with-a-warm-fuzzy-feeling type) and couldn't help but stare in awe at the origin, the unifying principles of about all other religions, so plain, so easy, so simple. It's like KISS applied to religion/existence.
On the technical side, I was raised with 8bit computers, the type that had ROM-BASIC and would boot in a second to a very intriguing prompt. I learned BASIC from the books that came with it (my father helped since he once programmed in FORTRAN in punched cards), and in about a year I was programming in assembly and reading about computer architecture. I like bits, and combining bits. I like putting simple things together to accomplish complex things. I get offended by being exposed for too much time to icons and GUIs. This means I like systems where I can boot into a programming environment, and where I can go down to the bits if I want to, and combine things together in complex ways. This obviously means I like Unix, where I can have several programming languages out-of-the-box, where I can treat myself to the expressiveness of a carefully crafted command line, where the system tries its best to get out of the way so that you can combine tools in unpredictable ways.
I see in both Unix and Yoga one of the key concepts of elegance, and that's simplicity. Just the right dose of basic unifying concepts, and a universe of combinatorial explosion to analyse.
I hope you enjoy the posts as much as I will enjoy writing.

4 comments:

lclaudio said...

Let there be blog... :)

I'll be checking your blog daily as I always loved reading your thoughts, since the GCBMU (sp?) thing. Of course, I have to state here that I see you more like a genius, a Unix guru, a person who knows how to give meaning to words like friendship than a religious guru ;)
Anyway, discordianism is fun, mainly the hot dog related laws.
Happy to see you here, pal!

Luciano Sky said...

Combining this post with the previous one and I came up with Yodix.

"Use the force, Luke Sky"

Anonymous said...

/me searching for Raja Yoga on Google

Luciano Sky said...

(Este post tem que ser em português por razões trocadilhísticas)

Nova forma, pensei no "DELUBIAN", um projeto Linux em homenagem ao Ali Lulalá e os 300 ladrões.