Ignorance and judgement

David Toub blogs about snobbery, elitism and "atty-tood". Sadly, I think most elitism and snobbery comes from simple ignorance. Most people lose at least some part of their superiority when they are (properly) exposed to the thing that they deride.

In the world of programmers nowhere is this more prevalent than in the language/editor/platform wars. A lot of these wars are started in various fora by somebody who has a certain degree of knowledge about the language/editor/platform whose virtues they extoll (enough to know which features to laud at least) but little knowledge of the competing technologies.

Although editors and platforms may indeed provide different features, languages, like music, can say anything to those who want to listen. Sure they have different flavours; that's why I prefer Python to Ruby (down in the back row). But at the end of the day they are all capable of moving the machine to do the same things (notwithstanding the fact that some languages cannot do certain things for architectural reasons).

Those who refuse to acknowledge certain basic qualities of these forms of expression (music, languages, fashion, painting, sculpture) do so out of ignorance and myopia. And prejudice is never far behind ignorance and judgement.