Any Colour Will Do

In a team setting, everybody has a common goal, and I agree that the role of of a good team lead is to steer people towards that goal.

Open-source is a different world, because people who only have an interest in, say, syntax will show up. They're not interested in talking about the rest of the proposal, because it's hard or beyond their expertise. It's hard to tell people not to talk about the only thing they care about, because you have to tell them to quit contributing to the things they care about.

It's unfortunate, but bikeshedding will always be with us so long as there is no model-presentation separation of source code. That lapse allows all these pointless[1] arguments to continue.

Take an online store. In its database, you wouldn't refer to an individual product by English name; you'd use a UUID. No one's going to argue over what the UUID hex value should be. But in plaintext source code, human names and delimiters do matter, even though they are just one way to prettify an AST.

[1] Arguing over syntax is pointless in most contexts, but the ergonomics of syntax do matter socially! Which makes the arguments all the more infuriating.

"bike shedding," AKA "Parkinson's law of triviality":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_triviality

"Parkinson observed and illustrated that a committee whose job is to approve plans for a nuclear power plant spent the majority of its time with pointless discussions on relatively trivial and unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bike-shed, while neglecting the less-trivial proposed design of the nuclear power plant itself, which is far more important but also a far more difficult and complex task to criticize constructively."