"software must be a human language ..."
Let's see, Irish, a programmer, xml and python enthusiast, reflector on philosophies and anguisher over ontologies.
You might enjoy some sanskritness--
especially if you can read about meta-sanskrit, the kernel of grammar.
David
My first reaction is that you want Buddhism and the religions at least one or two levels from the base class. Your big three major religions define a great many methods that don't appear in Buddhism at all. In the spirit of OO as attempting to mimic human patterns of organization, perhaps an investigation of the religions and philosophies that predated Buddhism might give you some inspiration.
If you have knowledge of anyone other than you or I who's written about this line of thought, please post links.
Thanks for the link to the Buddhist resources, they're certainly more interesting than most of the OT stuff in Planet Python.
Bill
I would make Meme the base class, with MemeComplex a subclass of Meme with a Memes collection. Religion would be a subclass of MemeComplex, with a Followers collection of Person objects. The Religion class would also inherit the Memes collection which would contain different things depending on the specific subclass of Religion.
Consider also the possibility that "real world" ontologies (such as whichever hierarchy contains religion) have a lot more abstract base classes, and a lot more (perhaps very tangled) hierarchy than you would normally devise when encoding a concept as software. Mark Cidade's very interesting breakdown might be a vast oversimplification of what you might get if you were trying to be as accurate as humanly possible.
We always simplify and make tradeoffs when designing hierarchies. This is presumably not just because we don't have perfect information but because we want the result to be "readable by humans". I don't see why the full complexity of a real object or real concept would be that obliging to our limitations. Look at concepts in mathematics for an example: as abstract and simplified as possible yet barely comprehensible to all but a select group of adepts devoted to studying a small set of concepts.
Thinking about it, another, (perhaps obvious?), way to state the above is that "real world" ontologies might actually be complex graphs rather than just hierarchies. And there may be some very fine-grained inheritance going on. A real religion, like Buddhism, might have dozens or hundreds or more ancestor concepts feeding into it, some of which have overlapping domains, many of which are subtly defined. This is even if the only edge type possible (the only -relationship- possible) is "is-a".
(My mind wanders to the possibility that generic functions (whether static or dynamic) might be better at expressing this complexity of relationships than straight class-based inheritance, particularly in their ability to add new relationships as you think of them. But that's not an idea that's fully baked.)
Yeah, I've been agonizing over the cow picture as well. Not seeing it.
(remove the letters q, z & x from domain name for e-mail). Yeah, I was pretty upset too since I have a tendency to see pictures in patterns fairly fast. At first I saw what looks like a small, scribbled woman squatting (look all the way to the left, below the upper solid dark patch... frizzled hair, 2 eyes, mouth, arms, etc.) Well, maybe I'm just crazy but I saw that but nothing else. After 20 minutes I gave up and looked on p140. A cow! Relief? Nope, still no cow. Go to bed, next day, still no cow. Knowing what I'm looking for, I Googled for pictures of cows. Boom. 1m later I see the cow. First, focus only on the solid black and solid white. The roundish-part in the upper-left is the cow's forehead. The solid black shapes to the left and right are the ears. Below them the mostly-black smudge is the nose. The cow's body extends to the right. Block out all the black parts that have white showing through (they're just shading) and you should see the cow. Still no cow? Do what I did, and search Google for pictures of cows. Look for a cow that's looking right at you with its body extending to one side or the other. Despite all this, yes I did feel relieved when I saw the cow. Yes I immediately see the cow each time I look at that picture.
THANK YOU FOR PRESERVING OUR SANITY DAN CHISARICK! We thought that damn cow would be the death of us. We are now able to continue reading the book.
With sincere gratitude,
Jamie and Courtney
Dan,
I got it! Thanks.
Sean
Thanks for showing me the cow finally, Dan Chisarick! I was relieved to see I wasn't the only one with a problem of seeing the cow. I still, also, experienced relief at seeing it for what it was.
OMG!! I was just blogging TODAY about not being able to see the cow even after I knew it was a cow. I haven't read all the comments yet, but I saw that someone tried Googling pictures of cows, which I tried today, too! But I guess I wasn't persistent enough, because it didn't help. It appears the answer is somewhere in these comments. I am so happy. 
Thank you so much. I've been staring at that picture ALL DAY.
I couldnt see the darn cow either. Im going directly home to look it up again. Thanks.
i see the cow finally! weeeeeeeeeeee .... thanks for the wonderful description. I see the cow everytime now 
haha i just googled "steve hagen cow image" because i was about to burn this book. i still think its a pretty questionable cow but i can see where its coming from i guess. thanks guys.
I came here after googling because I could not see the darned image either. I still did not see it after Dan's clear description, but seeing an image of a cow did the trick. Thanks!
Commenting by HaloScan
