Sacred Cow

A questionable idea that lingers due to momentum, installed doctrine, or deep investment attachment.

This seems a little insulting to Hindus, for whom the phrase "sacred cow" has a very different meaning indeed (as well as it being the original one).

Perhaps, but it has entered into the idiom for good or bad. (AmericanCulturalAssumption, of course.)

Not to belabour the issue too much, but I think the idiom comes from the JudeoChristian? anti-idolism teachings in the Bible; it's a "sin" to worship an idol, such as the sacred cow (which may be the identical sacred cow that Hindus worship). I'm not a historian of religion, just reporting some trivia I seem to remember from somewhere. Could be wrong.

I think those idols were not living animals but sculptures made out of gold.

According to The American Heritage� Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, the term derives "from the veneration of the cow by the Hindus." http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=sacred%20cow If the phrase were to derive from Judeo-Christian history, it would probably have referred to the golden calf the Israelites made when God brought them out of Egypt (described in Exodus chapter 32). However, a sacred cow is something that is immune from criticism or cannot be destroyed. This fits right in metaphorically with the reverence Hindus give the animal, but not with any Judeo-Christian teaching.

See: ModernDinosaur

What was the programming meaning again can someone elaborate on it please?

A decision or process that cannot be questioned or must be used.

Anecdote

We used IBM everything in one of my previous lives. The back end was a BigBlue setup (with false floor), the desktops were AT-339 boxes, the network was either PcNetwork? or TokenRing?. And the development tools were all IBM (the PE2 editor, their version of the compiler, etc.), right down to the screen management software module.

The reasoning? Various. "IBM will always be there." (Yes, and so will MicrosoftCorporation, but they no longer support anything they wrote in 1995.) "The customer insists on IBM." Can't really argue with that one. "It's best to have a single vendor, for support reasons." Sounds reasonable, but ...

You get the picture: if it wasn't IBM, it didn't get in the door. Unhappily, the original analytical thinking that resulted in that conclusion was never reviewed, and as other technologies outpaced what IBM was shipping, our competitors began to overtake us. All debate was stifled. IBM had become our SacredCow. It didn't matter that other networking vendors were doing it better and cheaper. It didn't matter that this Unix thing and DEC were showing more promise. It didn't matter that a fistful of other programming editors and development environment were handing IBM's tools their respective hats.

I was front and center the day IBM's SacredCow image self-destructed. They discontinued a product (the Screen Manager) that was indispensable in our architecture. They wouldn't allow us an end-of-life purchase block, they wouldn't sell us the rights or source. Nothing. They would no longer sell it, and any copies we sold from there on out would be considered piracy.

We lost a couple of executives in the scramble that followed.

I was tasked with finding a suitable replacement, with one of the requirements being that we could get the source - we had to create an API for it that would reduce or eliminate the impact on the rest of the system. We still had to buy the hardware from IBM, but our tools were re-mandated: thou shalt use only tools for which perpetual licenses and/or source can be obtained.

Now, we still couldn't get them to move off of DOS, even with OS/2 (w/o PresentationManager?) shipping and Unix now available for smaller boxes, and that became their next SacredCow.

CategoryIdiom