However, I found myself in a position of borrowing my 'faith' from others, at least partially. This, I hope doesn't reflect on my lack of creativity or self-esteem.. or does it?

Nothing wrong with recognizing a good thing when you see it. As the Einstein quote on my homenode states:

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

I do disagree with the "There is no system but GNU, and Linux is one of its kernels." quote (at least how I interpret it :). There are a lot of other systems out there, many of which are superior to the GNU system in certain aspects. Ignoring the strengths of your perceived competitors will only weaken your project in the long run.

As for a single guiding quote, I have always liked the following:

A conclusion is simply the place where someone got tired of thinking. ~ Arthur Block

:)

Like many others here, my sig is hard to see. You have to look very carefully. It represents some of my favorite ideas.

• The set of all sets that are not members of themselves.
• Massive particles that travel faster than the speed of light.
• The largest prime number. (It was hard to fit that one.)
• Programming languages that are more fun to use than Perl.

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

"Suppose you were an idiot... And suppose you were a member of Congress... But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain

???

"suppose you were a member of Congress... And suppose you were an idiot... But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain

come on, you are a programmer!
what a nice world this would be if all idiots were memebers of congress! so easy to spot
greetings from germany
dante

Years ago, a man with cancer started a new treatment, which had good results and was -- at the time -- confirmed by other medical personnel.

His doctor noted that his health improved, and the treatment continued.

News got out that the treatment was not more effective than a placebo; the original results were falsified and the supporting results were skewed.

His doctor noted that the man's health suddenly took a downturn, and had a thought.

His doctor mocked up a series of articles that "reproved" the effectiveness of the treatment, and gave them to the man. The doctor noted that the man's health began to improve again.

Eventually, however, the man got ahold of some more real news, and, thinking that research had wavered but had finally decided the treatment wouldn't work, began to become more ill again.

Despite the best work of his doctor, the man died.

The man had a deep, overriding faith in science. He also believed any research thrown in front of him, apparently. Perhaps, had he faith in God, he would have survived; or, perhaps, died and believed God wished it so. I have actually heard a psychologist hypothesize that cancer isn't the result of random mutation but the direct reaction to an inability to adapt.

I think that what a person thinks shapes their very reality. Some of this is feedback, where they are not conscious of it, and some is an effort of will on the part of the person.

If I think I am a failure, and I act like a failure long enough, then I will be a failure; my mentality shaped my reality.

I realize this could easily sound like babble. That's why I usually don't discuss it...but you asked. :)

-----------------------
You are what you think.

I have a file of one-liners on my system that I have "collected" over the years. The file is used to update my email templates once an hour, with a perlscript of course.

As I browse through it I see that the entries can be divided into mainly two groups, puns/jokes and deeper thoughts.

Some excerpts:

Puns

• Smith & Wesson: The original Point-and-Click interface.
• Radioactive cats have 18 half-lives.
• OK, so what’s the speed of dark?
• Recursive, adj.; see Recursive
• Middle age is when you choose your cereal for the fiber, not the toy.

Thoughts

• Truth is not defined by majority vote.
• Learn concepts, not methods - a good mind devises its own methods.
• Its better to light a candle than curse the darkness.
• Integrity is doing the right thing, even if nobody is watching.
• It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.
• You can easily judge the character of others by how they treat those who can do nothing for them or to them. -- Malcolm Forbes

I'm happy to say that I see both of these two sides of reality reflected in the monastary, which might be why I enjoy it so much.

From my own experience:

Well, I was going to say I'm agnostic about my agnosticism, but I don't feel strongly enough about saying it to post it...

But then, maybe my lack of sig says it all. :)

Considering that I have some quite strong beliefs, this is an unusual post. Hmm.

I've adopted this as my statement of faith. If I continue to code, I will continue to learn. I may make mistakes, but in the end, I'll be better at the game.

Dave

Statements of faith. I love them. Kind of like sound bites for the soul. I have a few, and I use them when I think about it.

• I drank what?
• Fear is the mind killer...
• Credit Cards are a contract where you get something today and they hope to get a whole lot more down the road.
• Capitalism is not about whether you are happy, healthy and wise, but about whether you can make someone money.
• You can't put out a fire by throwing boards at it.
• Good programmers are visionary. They can see beyond the current specs to the next level. Good programmers are also normally frustrated with the lack of vision around them.
• Faith is what we fall back to when the proof does not pan out.
• You would not want the average programmer running the business side of things, so get your damn business people out of the programming side of things.
• I had an evil twin. It was more cost effective if I served both roles.
• I was blinded by the light. Then I hit the utility pole.
• The grass is always greener over the septic tank.
• I tried being serious about life, but life was not serious about me.
• The things I regret most in life are not the things I did wrong, but the things I did not do at all.
• And many many more.....

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then -- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn."
        -- T.H. White, "The Once and Future King"

"A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts--physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on--remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!
        -- Richard P. Feynman in "The Feynman Lectures on Physics"

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
        -- Richard P. Feynman's comment on the Challenger disaster

A question that had long intrigued me, and I look forward to the responses. vladb, thank you for introducing it.

As to a statement or theme, while I do not use a signature line at the moment, an observant reader of my humble posts and responses would likely find the "theme" to be a quote from Robert A. Heinlein's character Valentine Michael Smith (VMS) from Stranger in a Strange Land, "I am but an egg."

For those unaware of the plot, the book is about VMS, who was discovered after being raised by Martians, the child of two members of the first, failed mission to Mars, and traces the misadventures as he must learn how to be "human" after being brought back to Earth an adult. In Heinlein's books involving Martians, the Martians' life cycle is described as progressing through several stages, from the youngest (an egg) to the oldest (the Old Ones) who no longer require a body and can decide when they wish to cease.

I seem to find, when looking around the Monastery, a similar spectrum, from other eggs and fellow nestlings to our vaunted Old Ones who are not afraid to share their wisdom and guidance (and even, sadly, some who have for now decided to discorporate). I also find that I know just enough to realize I have much to learn (for starters, OOP, "-wT and use strict," security, network and interface coding, modules and packages, and much, much more) before it should be safe for me to stand up in the nest of good coding, much less crawl from it.

Anyway, I like to leaven the (mostly) serious discussion with some fun memories from my childhood -- comments by Loonie Tunes characters. Since I joined PM December 12, on the twelth of each month I change over to a new quote to try to keep things fresh.

It's not exactly a 'confession of faith' but rather some sort of counterbalance to the deep (sometimes approaching theological) discussions that we get into.

--t. alex

(Insert amusing cartoon character's line here.)

Although I don't have a "statement of faith" here, I'd have to say that my guiding principle is that A debugged program is simply one for which the conditions that make it fail have not yet been found (or, more simply, There's always one more bug). This isn't just pessimism--it's an acknowledgment that I can't be perfect and I have to settle for "good enough".

=cut
--Brent Dax
There is no sig.

"Don't use map in void context"