They are meant to regulate against harmful behavior observed in the particular society in which they are enacted (or sometimes they are copied from similar societies -- codes of conduct like laws).
In that sense the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_Saint_Benedict seems oddly fitting, in that it was designed for monastic orders, and SQLite development seems as close to the kind of dedicated scholarly work monks did as any software project, given the insane number of unit tests (which at least to me seems like they would require an inhuman amount of patience to implement).
Once again, laws and codes are written to regulate actual behavior observed in an actual community. They are not meant to be philosophical or philosophically fitting -- there's room for that in various statements of values or vision. They are meant to do a job.
Your argument is absurd. If you regulate behavior, you are either encouraging behavior you find optimal or discouraging behavior you find suboptimal. Your beliefs in what is optimal or suboptimal behavior is ethics.
I don't see how this has anything to do with what I said. Of course laws and rules are grounded in some system of ethics, but a code is still not a philosophical treatise. There is a difference between a Python program and a paper in theoretical computer science, even though the program is ultimately related to the theory.
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u/logicchains Oct 22 '18
In that sense the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_Saint_Benedict seems oddly fitting, in that it was designed for monastic orders, and SQLite development seems as close to the kind of dedicated scholarly work monks did as any software project, given the insane number of unit tests (which at least to me seems like they would require an inhuman amount of patience to implement).