In 1997, somebody looked at the increasingly serious world of object-oriented software design and decided what it really needed was a church. The resulting First Church of Grady Booch is still online, still speaking in inheritance hierarchies, and still treating software methodology with exactly the amount of reverence programmers tend to deserve.
The joke works because Grady Booch was not an obscure name. Booch was one of the major figures in object-oriented analysis and design, and in the mid-1990s he worked with Jim Rumbaugh and Ivar Jacobson on the effort that became the Unified Modeling Language. UML was an attempt to bring order to a period when competing object-modeling systems had multiplied into what the Object Management Group itself describes as the “method wars.”
The Church takes that seriousness and runs it through the class hierarchy.
Its front page explains that the church is itself an object. It inherits from Grady Booch, becomes a superclass of the people, and occupies a church building that is a subclass of Religious Structure, which is a subclass of Building. The joke is not merely “programming is a religion.” It is written in the actual conceptual vocabulary that object-oriented programmers were spending their working lives thinking about.
The linked Booch Bible extends the bit into scripture. That makes the site a small but unusually clean fossil of 1990s programmer culture: people building a public joke for other people who would immediately understand terms such as classes, inheritance and object models without needing a glossary or a platform algorithm to deliver it to them.
There is also a useful historical accident here. The Church says it was founded in 1997, the same period when UML was becoming a formal standard. The parody therefore survives beside the technology it was parodying. Modern developers can read polished histories of UML anywhere; this page shows what programmers were joking about while that history was still happening.
For a webmaster, the site is another reminder that a tiny joke can outlive entire generations of frameworks if its dependencies are basically “HTML and a domain name.”
CacheRat’s larger 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains many sites like this: not necessarily historically important on their own, but excellent evidence of how people actually used the Web.
The First Church remains online, and its sacred text remains mercifully shorter than most enterprise architecture documentation.