Macho Programming →
I have to admit, even for a zen-like chap such as me, it’s still quite the mental effort to repress knee-jerk reactions about the tools and programming languages other people use. Perl is for dinosaurs, Ruby for hipsters, Haskell is useless outside of academia, C is for masochists, C# for corporate drones. Computer programmers have probably been waging these kinds of petty religious wars since the dawn of computing. It’s harmless bickering, and not entirely unexpected since each of us has invested so much time into learning to properly use the tools we’ve chosen. Nobody likes to be told they’ve not chosen wisely, but everybody likes to tell everybody else about their own wise choice. It’s a silly but harmless social phenomenon.
Undoubtedly, we’ve all seen this pattern at work in ourselves or our peers, and a healthy awareness of our tendency toward religious devotion to our toolset will do us much good.
