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Comment by berntb | Hacker News Reader

>>The average new Perl programmer is not going to go looking for a library that does object-oriented behavior until it's too late.

Sigh, please don't start language wars by stuff like assuming new programmers sits alone in an ivory tower and don't talk to people, read blogs or browse a new book. (Modern Perl discuss Moose before the old standard, for instance.)

Edit: I'm just not going to touch where you assume all Perl teams that write large code bases are too stupid to agree on best practices. (I'll ask this back instead: Why are there so many language wars-lovers in some open source communities...?)

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Why are there so many language wars-lovers in some open source communities...?

Probably the same reason the French don't like the English or the Indians don't like the Pakistanis. The closer two things are to each other, the more passionate people are about the differences.

My experience is that all the languages are identical. Python has a culture of cleanliness at the core, but there is a lot missing from the language that makes it unclean in practices. (See: the investment bank I worked where all new apps were written in a C#/C++/Python trialect, to coin a new word.) Perl is a very messy language, but the community has hyper-overreacted and have made a very clean set of "best practices". I haven't done much Ruby, but I can't say anything other than that it looks like a combination of Perl and Python, with a relatively new community around it.

These three languages are largely the same thing: they run slow and they're fun to write. Hence all the infighting.

Learning a language is an investment. People defend their investment strategies lest they be considered a fool. Attacking alternatives is a form of defense. I fear it's as simple as that.

The original question was -- why do some communities seem to be more oriented towards language wars than others?

Can't speak for all of them, but if a language has "there's more than one way to do it" as its main motto, I guess the people from the ecosystem are less likely to attack other languages.

>>Why are there so many language wars-lovers in some open source communities...?

Honestly, I think that the reason is simple: because it's entertaining. Yeah, sometimes I'm tired of reading the same arguments over, and over, and over again. But sometimes, an OP is particularly eloquent in his trashing a language, and I like that, even if the language he's trashing is my favorite.

The same goes with rants. I can't understand people debating over Linus Torvalds rant on C++. Honestly, I found it hilarious and well written. That's it, I'm looking no further because I know that this type of argument has no end.

I would certainly not care to debate the relative merit of my favorite language in one of those troll topics, but I do enjoy reading heated programmers exercising their writing skills against each other.

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