The meaning of agnostic in this sentence. I thought agnostic was something religious, so I cannot understand it use in the following sentence. Can you help me? ....Then, one day, we speak to our cust

Marc

The meaning of agnostic in this sentence. I thought agnostic was something religious, so I cannot understand it use in the following sentence. Can you help me? ....Then, one day, we speak to our customers like we usually do to ensure we’re meeting their expectations. They inform us that we really need to be able to support a document database like MongoDB in addition to MySQL. Hold on. Wait. You mean our code that uses our data layer needs to be agnostic to the database under the hood?!... From the sentence, my best gamble is that it means 'aware' here. Is that correct? Can agnostic be a synonym for aware?

Nov 16, 2015 9:18 PM

Answers · 17

"Agnostic" means "not knowing." It was coined by the biologist Thomas Huxley in the 1800s to express the idea of not knowing whether or not there is a God (as opposed to atheism, the belief that there is no God). In software development circles, people see an analogy to religion in the intensity and fervor with which some developers advocate for their favorite computer languages, platforms, hardware, and in this case DBMS's. To be "agnostic" means you don't have a strong belief that any of them is the one true DBMS and that you are willing to support all of them.

November 16, 2015

This has absolutely nothing to do with the question, but I never can resist telling a terrible joke: A dyslexic, agnostic insomniac spent a sleepless night in bed wondering if there really is a dog.

November 17, 2015

It's more "_not_ aware". "Agnostic" literally means "without knowledge". In the religious sense, it means you don't know whether there's a god or not. Here, it means the data layer should be developed without assuming a particular DBMS underneath.

November 16, 2015