First, programming language fads have been a thing since about 10 minutes after the immortal Adm. Grace Hopper came up with COBOL. Thompson and Ritchie could h

First, programming language fads have been a thing since about 10 minutes after the immortal Adm. Grace Hopper came up with COBOL. Thompson and Ritchie could have used ALGOL, Lisp, FORTRAN, BCPL or PL/I to write Unix, but instead they created C and used that. I guarantee at the time there was someone at Bell Labs bitching about how they should be solving "real problems" instead of messing around with a new programming language. But more practically, developers write code because they're paid to, or to scratch an itch. If a real problem doesn't substantially bother anyone enough to get solved by a developer, then it's not really a problem. In general, code maintenance and optimization is always Somebody Else's Problem™. Instead of writing this blog post, the author could have spent that time optimizing some open source code, right?