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Holy war)
"Religious war" aka "Holy war" is a term used in the computer programming community (mainly the Unix community). It refers to heated debates on some subject of interest to the community, discussed over a long time and without clear results.
One well-known religious war is the war over what text editor is the best: Emacs or vi (the Editor wars). This particular debate is sometimes humorously described as "the Church of Emacs" vs "the Church of Vi" where both participants refer to their preferred editor as "the One True Editor". Another religious war is the decades-long one concerning endianness (having to do with differing byte sequence schemes for multi-byte words stored in computer memory and/or transferred between computers).
Of course, not everyone will accept that a specific debate is a religious war, as the term in a sense denotes such debate as futile. These differing feelings on whether a particular debate is to be considered a religious war is, naturally, a significant factor of a debate's being (turned into) just such a "war"—people on both sides will tend to make dead-serious, emotionally laden, arguments, provoking each other to rising heights of disagreement. Some religious wars conducted over the Internet are considered flame wars. The "computer term" religious war is older than the Internet, though.
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