We have all experienced it: you make an innocent statement about a programming language online, and suddenly you are mired in a flamewar. You are labeled a fanboy and flamebait.
Why is choice of programming language such a touchy issue? It’s like once you enter into certain areas of the topic of programming languages*, you are instantly transported to a land of Black and White, good and bad, binary logic, of bitter conflict and rivalries between factions.
You can explain why people are so fighty with cognitive dissonance. Learning the intricacies of a programming language takes time and effort. It requires a lot of trial and error, along with reframing your fundamental understanding of how to approach a problem. In order to justify such an struggle, programmers raise the level of importance of the particular features of that programming language, particularly the foundational ones. So any statement that seems to abase the language is seen as an insult to your own effort and thought process. Programming language is a personal issue.
If you compound this with the impersonal and anonymous magnifier of the internet, where each past statement is indelibly marked alongside other comments, and people tending to post before they read all of them, and those incendiary one-line comments tend to be read more, and all of the other incitements of the expanding spiral of discussion threads, you get something like you see online all the time.
Unfortunately, there is nothing to do about it. It appears that,
like religious or political disputes, they are here to stay. It’s
the price you pay for being online.
Notes
*Comparative analysis is one. Typing style (static versus dynamic) is another.
