Saturday 12 May 2012

Mussar: Egolessness - Intro

In his landmark book during the 1970's, Gerald Weinberg* coined the term "Egoless Programming." Meaning, the only way to make computer code maintainable by OTHERS was to code it w/o one' own ego, and to follow the rules of structure instead.

Rarely has computer programming intersected with Spirituality and Mussar in such a profound way. I would like to take a survey of some classic cases of Ego vs. Egolessness within Classic Jewish Thought.


NB: For a classic Mussar perspective of Ego vs. Egolessness, see the first two chapters of Orchot Tzaddikim.

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* see EG

Gerald Weinberg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Weinberg

Especially "The Psychology of Computer Programming".

Shalom and Regards,
RRW

1 comment:

Avraham said...

I get confused when someone talks about the "ego."
I have seen books of Musar and chasidut and eastern religions that seems to take the ego to be easily understood.
But to me a self, is utterly mysterious.
Man is self, that
now seems clear. But what is self?
Our orthodox rabbis embraced psychology that promised us a answer for this question.
And we are told, the healthy inner-directed person will really care for others.