By that logic, driving on the right side of the road in the US vs driving on the left in the UK is "pop culture".
The reasoning in the article didn't improve as I read on...
Well, if using the definition of pop culture described in this article, pop culture evolves. Where countries drive on the road can be related more to how programming languages define blocks of code. C-like languages use curly braces to define blocks. This can be related to how since medieval times, horses rode on the left side of the road. More modern languages use different ways to define blocks of code. For example, Python uses tabbing and whitespace, Ruby uses the `end` keyword.
Continuing to use the traffic analogy, you don't have to use cruise control while driving on a long stretch of highway, but it's a lot easier to, and everyone else does. In the article, raganwald is talking about how coding conventions and techniques evolve over time. The analogy about driving in the UK vs the US is more equivalent to the syntactic rules of the specific language you are working with; it's the law which side of the road to drive on. You'll get penalized if you do otherwise. Using or not using cruise control is your choice, and so are naming conventions in different languages. Conventions evolve, even when the specific "laws" of the languages don't change as quickly, or at all.
And it isn't because it's superficial and fashionable. It's because there are underlying logical reasons for doing what the rest of the herd is doing.
Likewise with sticking to coding conventions for a language.
The performance of every given actor in the system is inhanced by everybody else adopting the system. Its absolutly normual and good. Thats how our social liver works in general, the state mostly only comes in later and writes stuff down.
Not at all. I don't drive on the right side because "everyone else does" and "that's the style". I do it because its the law, and because I would be risking my life and the lives of others to do otherwise. Having a function with an underscore in its name isn't breaking any laws, and isn't risking any lives or anything even remotely analogous. It is entirely based on subjective whims.
Case in point: i don't know any major project that does not follow the style conventions of the framework it's built upon.
PEP8 is tricky because it's technically a "style guide", but heaven help you if you're trying to get your code into somebody else's repository and aren't abiding its tenets.