I thought about it some more and now I know why I was irritated by this remark. I just felt this remark was exactly the same thing as some jerks bulling a kid w

I thought about it some more and now I know why I was irritated by this remark. I just felt this remark was exactly the same thing as some jerks bulling a kid with glasses (or the fat one) in school. There is that social situation where you're new to the group and don't really know what's expected of you, what you should do. But you'd like to fit in. It's after initial introductions and you know the group's members names, but they're not that happy about you hanging around them. Some of them seem hostile, others just indifferent. So naturally you want to avert their attention and, if possible, show them that you have much in common. And that's when this unpopular, fat or whatever, kid happens to fall just in front of you. Of course you will be laughing, at the very least, and it's quite possible that you'll be calling the kid an idiot with others. You know, maybe you're not fully accepted into the group yet, but at least you're not him. And you can laugh with your buddies, this matters too. I find this remark exactly the same kind of thing. I read it as: "ok, so you may use PHP, or maybe Java, that's all cool because hey, at least we're not lispers! We're all one big, happy programming family (except for the lispers, of course, who don't even know what a hash is)!" I don't like this. I wrote "PHP" because it's a popular target of the same bullying tactic. And Java, too, just in the other circles. I don't like it in these cases either, despite the fact that I don't use either PHP nor Java and frankly I don't think they're great. They may not be, but bullying is a bit below what I want to see in a technical article - or in real life.