Religious wars are also counterproductive, because they tend to give too much power to the MBA-culture conquistadores who really don't belong in technology, but

Religious wars are also counterproductive, because they tend to give too much power to the MBA-culture conquistadores who really don't belong in technology, but end up ruling it because engineers are so fractious. When we have the Scala and Python and Lisp crowds all slugging each other over minor differences in the languages, it generates background FUD in the same way that mechanical collisions create waste heat. Then the MBA-culture colonizers get overloaded thanks to all these disparate overblown accounts of each language's deficiencies, but since they construe their job as Making Decisions, they feel a need to Say Something and make everyone use Java, because it's "the standard". Now there's no Scala and no Python and no Lisp for anyone (at least, at that company). Religious wars actually lead us to mediocrity, because business people get to make the decisions when we become so fractious.