Hrrm. I don’t think it’s that simple. Looking at that page, I imagine nonprogrammers wonder:
What are comments?
What are strings?
What is this “#=>” stuff?
“primitives”?
… This seems to be written for people who are already familiar with some other language. Better to show a couple of examples so that they recognize patterns and become curious.
The emotions are irrational in the sense that they are not supported by anything—your brain generates these emotions in these situations and that’s it. Emotions are valuable and we need to use rationality to optimize them. Now, there are two ways to satisfy a desire: the obvious one is to change the world to reflect the propositional content of the desire. The less obvious one is to get rid of or alter the desire. I’m not saying that to be rational is to get rid of all your desires. I’m saying that it’s a tradeoff, and I am suggesting the possibility that in this case the cost of placating the desire to not die is greater than the cost of getting rid of it.
What worries me is this. It could well be that I am wrong and that the cost of immortality is actually lower than the cost to get rid of the desire for it. But I strongly suspect that this was never the reason for people here to pursue immortality. The real reason has to do with preservation of something that I doubt has value.