{"id":73,"date":"2002-11-14T08:15:06","date_gmt":"2002-11-14T13:15:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=73"},"modified":"2002-11-14T08:15:06","modified_gmt":"2002-11-14T13:15:06","slug":"web-code-and-talmud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=73","title":{"rendered":"Web, code, and Talmud"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Reflecting on <a href=http:\/\/www.hyperorg.com\/blogger\/archive\/2002_11_01_archive.html#85671228\">David&#8217;s puzzlement<\/a> about the Jews and software meeting in Boston the other day, I recalled this Joel Spolsky essay on how <a href=\"http:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/articles\/fog0000000053.html\">reading code is like studying Talmud,<\/a> in that it is best done in pairs, puzzling through and arguing about the meaning of the text.<br \/>\nWhen you think about it, the &#8220;link&#8221; form of the weblog has similarities to the classical Jewish form of text commentary. The blogger links to an article somewhere on the web, and then writes a commentary on the original text; then other commentators refer to the original commentator. In the traditional form, Jewish scholars wrote texts that commented on the bible or on the writings of earlier rabbis; and other rabbis wrote texts that commented on the earlier rabbis&#8217; writings.<br \/>\nBecause they didn&#8217;t have hypertext at the time, commentaries linked using chapter and sentence references; so when you study traditional texts, you wind up with a table full of books following the cross-references from book to book.<br \/>\nThe form of the Talmud is similar to a recorded newsgroup or blog comments discussion.  In the classical rabbinic academies, scholars discussed and debated a wide variety of topics, and those discussions were eventually edited into book form. The editors were concerned with representing the debate of ideas, not with historical accuracy  &#8212; often, there are arguments between rabbis who didn&#8217;t live at the same time.<br \/>\nIts not that the Rabbis didn&#8217;t know how to write neat, logical, linear exposition. The classic rabbinic period was contemporaneous with the Hellenized civilization of the ancient world; they had the models of Greek thinking all around them, and they borrowed when it suited them &#8212; the Passover seder is modeled after the Platonic symposium.  They looked at neat, logical, linear, hierarchical writing, decided that they didn&#8217;t like it, and wanted to write in weblog form instead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Reflecting on<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prDRq-1b","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}