> In another example of this performative culture of software craftsmanship, and I’ll use wood-working as an example because I grew up in that culture, woodworkers take pride in the finished product, and seeing that finish product being used. They are not all hot on the tools they use, and nor do they value the art of planing for its own sake. No, it’s always in furtherance of the ultimate goal: to produce something another human will enjoy using.<p>Okay, well that's just false. Wood workers tools are incredibly expensive and if you ask a wood worker about them they'll proudly show you what they are and glow about their quality and machining. I only know that because I've recently been looking into furniture making. Anyway, same sort of pride that programmers have around laptops, keyboards, languages, build systems, package managers, workflows, patterns <i>cough</i> tools of their trade.<p>The only difference, if you accept that a language is a tool, is that there is a massive barrier to entry for learning multiple languages at first, which usually requires that you implicitly or explicitly understand language fundamentals to make grasping concepts easier. I've worked with a lot of non-polyglot folks and this is usually the challenge. They'll very well understand one language but can only understand the world in it's paradigms. The world takes all types though.<p>> In fact, I’d wager that the niceness of the language is probably the least important part of choosing a language. Just ask everyone who bet the farm on coffeescript.<p>Ok, no. I've been on a few polyglot teams by now and I can tell you that I've experienced a theme of a main language and then several needs-based-implementations. That main language is usually a language that feels "nice" to code in by a majority of the programmers at the time. "Developer ergonomics" is definitely a thing I would classify as "niceness".<p>I've never understood the rage over people who make snarky comments about languages. So what? When I wrote in PHP in the early to mid 2000's people had all sorts of snarky things to say, it didn't deter me in learning new languages or applying myself more to PHP. The point that I think the author misses is that languages <i>are</i> different and so are various frameworks. They're all better at one thing or another, and just like programmers, fall in and out of relevancy all the time. Let people have their snark, it'll be invalid in a few years when we're refactoring the code base to run in WASM anyway.<p>If I was raising a kid I'd probably tell little Timmy not to pick on the PHP dev because they might grow up to be your boss, but I probably wouldn't write a Sunday rage post about it.