I've recently been intrigued by the Leiden Theory of language evolution. It basically suggests that language is perhaps better conceptualized as a separate organism that has co-ecological niche which happens to be the co-evolved biology of our minds. This semiotic organism is made of our neural components in a similar way to how simpler biology is made of atoms and molecules.

http://www.himalayanlanguages.org/files/driem/pdfs/prague.pd...

It also has some hypotheses on how God is an invitable emergence from all language, as it is the base type:

> The Leiden theory explains religion as a disease of language and predicts the existence of God and other such parasitic mental constructs as artefacts of language. God is the quintessential prototype of the non-constructible set because it can mean anything. This makes God the meme almighty.

And so, in that viewing, everything contains elements of religion, because religion is just some sort of super-meme, like the catch-all mail filter when things don't yet match another category ;) (sorry, just read the other post on mail)

When everything is a religion the word no longer holds any meaning. Maybe we should attempt to distinguish between a ritual and a habit? What is the distinction? I think the amount of emotion people attach to it. To me religion is like a hamster wheel for the emotional life of people. Too much activity with no observable gain. A habit is more reassuring and only lightly emotional in a lightly soothing sort of way.

Agile could be a religion if it comes with lots of worry whether we are doing it the right way. It can also be a set of habits if you just do some practical things regularly.

You all do understand that you cannot really be working together if you never talk in some kind of lightly structured way about what is to be done, right?

The article poses the question, is the agile structure the best way? Is it the only way?

Also, people do not need formal "structure" to communicate concepts. Is strict formal structure over projects better or less strict?

The closest way of knowing is to run scientific experiments. However, this is akin to running experiments to determine whether communism or capitalism is better. It's brutally hard to come up with an experiment or even the resources to run such a thing.

This is the article's point. If there's no science or theory backing agile or OOP up.... why do we, by default, consider it the "best" way and make it so ubiquitous? His answer is religion. OOP and agile are religions.

I guess I disagree that agile is defined by its structure.

I think it's defined by its value proposition - that shipping early and often and getting direct feedback from users produces better products than not doing so.

Which itself rests on the assumption that a product's value cannot be objectively asserted and is only the sum of its users' perceptions.