Actually, your attitude is exactly the one that advice is trying to foster. Keep in mind that some pieces of advice are not meant to stand alone; they're reacti

Actually, your attitude is exactly the one that advice is trying to foster. Keep in mind that some pieces of advice are not meant to stand alone; they're reactive and meant to act as pushback against worse things. There are religious wars between various languages, as I'm sure you're aware, and the driving force between a lot of the arguments is that the tool of choice is more important than solving the problem. If only they focused more on problem solutions rather than saying that Perl has too many sigils or Java is full of silly factory patterns, they'd be able to agree that Perl is useful for many things and Java is useful in many situations.