> Why do programmers feel the need to convince other programmers to switch to a different language? Because they themselves derived some benefit from it, and b

> Why do programmers feel the need to convince other programmers to switch to a different language? Because they themselves derived some benefit from it, and believe the other party would too, if only they would try it. Sometimes, I don't think it's just benefits, but certain languages offer different ways of doing things that other languages really could benefit from. Our older languages teach us things as we use them, like that nullable pointers as our only reference type were a bad idea. Encouraging others to use languages that adopt different ideals would seem to be to just be people trying to get people to see the merits of those ideals. > Why get into religious wars? Because we're still using languages with nullable pointers. More seriously, because people care about the quality of their work, and you don't always get to pick the tool for the job. And it can very well be that there isn't a good tool for the job, but only and okay tool for the job: while I use Python extensively at my job, and while its speed of development definitely benefits my team, I would kill for some static typing. (I've been looking into mypy for this reason, but being on Python 3 would help…) And people don't always use the right tool for the job, or I'd be done trying to explain why they should not be using raw bytestrings for text. They didn't pick the wrong tool for the job — they simply don't understand that actual string types exist, or why they should use them. (It doesn't help when the language/library's obvious choice is the wrong choice.)