Pope tempted by Python. Signs off on coding scheme for kids | Hacker News Reader

Pope tempted by Python. Signs off on coding scheme for kids

theregister.com

89 pointsBender70 comments

Often when the news media says that the pope has endorsed something, they're actually talking about a Vatican spokesperson or one of its departments, or a mention in the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano.

Because the Register article doesn't make it clear whether Pope Francis himself or a representative of the Vatican gave an endorsement, I started looking up information in other sources.

But in practically every article I could find that mentioned Miron Mironiuk and "Code With Pope," the information about the papal endorsement came from Mironiuk.

For example, this article from the BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67209806

I could not find any articles that directly quote a Vatican source, or the pope himself, as endorsing this project.

So until I can find some kind of credible source beyond Mironiuk's say-so, I am going to assume that he got some sort of recognition or general note of encouragement from someone in the Vatican. But it's doubtful that Pope Francis himself is partnering with this one app developer.

This didn’t click until now.

Likewise, any decisions made by a Canadian federal or provincial department are, by law, made by the responsible minister. In (obvious) reality, this is would be a decision made a lower level employee that has delegated signing authority to make it work within the framework of the law.

I'm glad you caught that because as a Catholic this has been a source of tremendous annoyance to me - the pope must be one of the most misquoted people in the modern era. So much so that I routinely just ignore "pope says" type articles.

If course even if he did say that it doesn't touch on morals or dogma so it's just a guy voicing his personal opinion. It would just be weird for him to voice it using his religious platform.

That said it is likely that some group in the Vatican has started a teach kids to code program under their charity wing. As to how effective such programs are - I'm skeptical. There are already lots of great python resources online - is this going to be geared towards Catholic kids and parents to help that niche get interested in code?

Fellow Catholic here, it’s interesting that Jorge Bergolio has chosen to endorse a computer programming language named after a serpent. I hope they won’t be using any Apple products for this project otherwise , truly, the prophetic forerunner of the antichrist and the end times have arrived.

Joke (maybe?).

Good joke, definitely.

Never miss an opportunity to be a kill joke!!! Python was named after Monty Python the British comedy group. If you have not watched them, I highly recommend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language)#...

> If course even if he did say that it doesn't touch on morals or dogma so it's just a guy voicing his personal opinion. It would just be weird for him to voice it using his religious platform.

I find that hard to accept. He is the Pope. It's like thinking a country's president saying something that isn't directly political is just voicing his opinion as a private citizen.

I doubt a single Australian thought the then Prime Minister Bob Hawke was making a political statement, proposing a new national holiday, or doing anything other than voicing an opinion as a private citizen when he celebrated the Australian win against the USofA in the America's Cup Race.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8mdHO2_Zo8

To be honest, I do think he is on some level speaking for Australians in general. Not formally speaking for the state of course, but the only reason we care about his opinion is that he is a national leader and not a private citizen.

We (Australians) also care about his opinion because he was an avid sportsman and took out a British record for downing a yard glass of beer.

Although I suppose the law degree and Rhodes scholarship add a little weight.

The main point here, though, is we are able to seperate his personal opinions from his role as Prime Minister just as I would hope that many Catholics would be able to seperate the opinions of the Pope on Python (if in fact there were any, given that this entire story seems to lack a direct primary Pontiff quote) from the Pope's official statments re: Catholicism and the wider Christian beliefs.

I suspect however that perhaps devout members of a religious flock that regard a person as a direct agent of God on earth might be less discerning about that person's opinions than the citizens of a democratic country are about the opinions of their temporay prime political representative particulalry as a good number of those citizens might not even support that representative.

TLDR: democratic citizens are likely more critical of their ephemeral leaders than religuos flocks are about their designated "voice of the lord".

Saying the Pope is "the voice of God" is inaccurate. He is an appointed leader who gets the last word on certain issues. There are plenty of Catholics critical of any Pope even with regard to his opinions on Catholic beliefs. Take a look at what rad trad Catholics say about the current Pope, for example.

The extent to which Catholics would give extra weight to the Pope's opinions outside his official role varies wildly. Much the same is true of any leader: e.g. the weight given to the opinions of a president of a democratic country by their supporters and opponents. The last president of the US is a particularly good example of this :)

See "ex cathedra" https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05677a.htm

Not sure whether you are agreeing or disagreeing ex-cathedra is very much in his official role, and applies to a tiny proportion of what Popes say.

I'd argue people who don't accept the authority of the holy see, by definition, aren't Catholic.

Depends. The Church's own doctrines place a lot of emphasis on following your individual conscience for example.

Also, any authority is only valid in an offical role.What we are discussing here is out of scope for that.

The Ten Commandments are now called requirements.txt.

And we thought CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md was contentious before.

That reminds me of the box-ticking code of conduct/ethics of SQLite, derived from the guidelines of a Christian monastery.

https://www.sqlite.org/codeofethics.html

I'm not much of one for Christian theology, but there is a lot of wisdom in the document. I especially like rules 14 through 19, I think those principles are found across faiths and creeds, and worthy of aspiration.

I heard he even considered casting Perl before swine

But ultimately the language doesn't matter; the price is widsom is above Ruby.

He did consider his own language - "Holy C", but many found the default font ("Roman baptismal") was supposed to be mono-spaced but ended up looking tri-spaced.

There is a variant called "HolyC", which was developed by Terry Davis as part of his solo development of TempleOS.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS

Darn nothing new under the sun!

It would be easier for a Caml to pass through the eye of a needle.

He even considered the JavaScripture but it wasn't deemed to be canon. As for C, he cast that to the void!

Well, one of his predecessors has opened the C, so perhaps Python is a logical evolution?

    import behavior
    from afterlife import Heaven, Hell, Limbo

    try:
        behavior.good()
        return Heaven()
    except behavior.MoralsError as sin:
        return Hell(sin)
    else:
        return Limbo()

bugfix: implement repentance

With the traffic between this world and the afterlife, using exceptions like this is really inefficient. Furthermore, a lot of souls with net bad behavior might be in a state of Grace, rescuing them from Hell.

An improvement might look like this:

    def judgement(soul):
        in_grace = soul.state.is_graceful() 
        good_works = len(soul.works)
        if in_grace: return 1 # Heaven
        if good_works > MORAL_MINIMUM: return 0 # Limbo
        return -1 # Welp.

Although, given the moral ambiguity of the spec, it might be better to use a language with more undefined behavior like C. Terry Davis addressed a lot of this when he built the third Temple in HolyC.

I actually work parttime at a startup where we're trying to use web3 to establish permanent, digital identities that you can use in the afterlife to bargain with demons. The idea is, you can use an NFT (who says web3 is dead!) to correlate the atoms in the immortal eternal one-soul with their constituent souls on earth, so you can identify your friends in Heaven (or Hell). Eventually, we hope to even link people on earth to people on heaven, via our Rust-based AngelLink blockchain. A sort of "tower to the heavens" so to speak.

If anyone else on HN is interested in this space, feel free to email me (darigo.maxwell at gmail dot com). Always looking to make new friends who love God and have a passion for big data and the thirst for God's presence.

You have my vote for Pitch of the Year. Possibly of Eternity, but it's a bit early for that.

(also, yes, of course you'll need UB for Purgatory, etc.)

I know I'm taking a joke comment WAY too seriously, but... that "else" branch is unreachable, right?

Depends on the exception. Maybe the sun wasn't moral.

that's right, and absolutely make sense, as the church meanwhile realized unbaptized babies don't go to limbo but to heaven.

Correct (in a `try ... else` the else branch is executed when the try block reaches the end of the block with no exception, and the return is leaving the block without reaching the end)

(Bonus context for anyone surprised that it is valid code — Python actually allows you to use “else” in more places than you’d expect - `for ... else` is my favourite (do a for loop over a list of things, `break` if you find the thing that you’re looking for, and then the `else` branch will be taken if you don’t find what you’re looking for. Much cleaner than keeping track of a separate i_found_the_thing bool IMO))

Taking the joke a bit too seriously, but that is a statement of moralistic therapeutic deism, not Christianity.

Corrected code.

  from behaviour import repentance
  from afterlife import Heaven, Hell, Limbo

  if person.is_baptised:
     if (person.state == repentance):
        return Heaven
     else:
       return Hell  # FIXME define Hell
  else:
    # TODO I think we need something with Limbo here
    return None

Well, if that code was written at any point after the 12th century, you need to add Purgatory. Also, for Limbo, you need to never have heard of the Catholic Church, so you probably need some kind of information tainting.

The Register has just won headline of the year, love it, and the initiative!

Surely it’d be even better if they’d used “snake” instead of “python”, and maybe swapped knowledge for coding?

I think it's a lot better as it is. A python is a snake. And it's about coding. That way the headline is somehow related to the content of the article.

I would protest that the rigidity of python is unfit for the catholic church. where do i nail my protestations

On a strongly typed door. Compiled of hardwood perhaps.

That's what PEPs are for

Glad the temptation wasn’t toward Apple

That was all the Eve online players!

Not sure the snake is symbolically better!

Glad he resisted the temptation and signed off on Scheme. Scheme is a much better programming language for kids to learn.

The Catholic Church, proving again that they take the century-long view of their commitments. (At least, I think Scheme will remain a tasteful choice for that long.)

I think "scheme" here is in the context of a programme - not the language.

i.e. the pope endorsed a programme to teach coding in Python for kids.

It was a joke.

I thought it might have been. It was unclear though, especially for my non-caffeinated morning brain. :D

Python, named after Monty Python.

Remember when priests and teachers condemmned the group and Life of Brian back in the day?

I like the title. Tempted by Python. You know, like the snake? What? I just woke up, need more coffee.

Also, the ordering of links is sus today.

64. A holistic approach to computing and sustainability inspired from permaculture (xxiivv.com)

65. Pope tempted by Python. Signs off on coding scheme for kids (theregister.com)

"Pope tempted by python" is some top notch trolling. Congratulations to whoever you are.

Recent and related:

Pope Francis encourages more children to code, especially in Catholic countries - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38012207 - Oct 2023 (50 comments)

Our Python, who art in syntax, hallowed be thy code...

Bless me Father for I have sinned, I have used tabs instead of spaces.

I could tell it was going to be that terrible site by the title alone.

If this won't flood the labor market and drive down those salaries I don't know what will. Clever move, technocrats, locking in the Pope.

Sorry. It's a bad habit.

Pope's infallibility vs. Python interpreter.

Well, you need infallibility if you're going to code in Python.

“Is the Space Pope reptilian?”

I cannot help but wonder if he's ever heard of TempleOS.

It would have been awesome for the Holy See to endorse HolyC

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