Monk with no name
--- nameless function. (Dalai Lambda?)
Scroll verse memorized by nameless monk
--- captured bindings.
Not harming a living creature as a principle ...
--- applicative programming.
... but killing a few enemies here and there
--- occasional destructive programming.
Bulletproof
--- Lisp code, obviously.
Old monk looks young
--- old ideas repackaged in ``new'' languages.
Everything is easy if you just believe
--- ditto, if you just have a clue.
Decades spent in obscurity guarding important secret
--- self explanatory.
Wasting two or more opponents in one apparent move
--- why, multiple dispatch!
Real answer to riddle. There are two, actually:
1) It's a trick question; the monk is really talking about jumbo
hotdogs that come in packages of #o10.
2) It's a pact between the hotdog and bun manufacturers so that
consumers have to buy enough to make (lcm 8 10) => 40 hot dogs. They
almost agreed on pair of relatively prime integers, but to avert
suspicion, they threw in a common divisor of two.