I have never cared about, or taken notice of any 'culture'. I agree that some programmers do, but I think you only pay attention to 'culture' if you don't reall

I have never cared about, or taken notice of any 'culture'. I agree that some programmers do, but I think you only pay attention to 'culture' if you don't really know what you're doing. False. If I'm starting a company around a product built with Rails, it behooves me to stick to cultural norms (in Rails' case: TDD/BDD, Continuous Integration, so forth) because otherwise it's difficult to find good developers that will work on the product. Our job as 'hackers' is to not do things the 'accepted way'. To think outside the box. To go against 'accepted wisdom'. That's kinda the point. That's not the point, it's just usually a means to an end. As you say, doing effective work in a Java shop requires either writing better Java, or using a language like Clojure. But in some cases it's faster to go with accepted wisdom rather than combat it, even if we disagree. In some cases, shockingly, the accepted wisdom is beneficial. Ignoring cultures around languages out of hand is arrogant, brash, and probably wrong. If after you've examined the culture you find you don't agree, that's completely different. You can only think outside the box once you've examined the box.