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I think python is the only language where the inevitable flamewar isn't about the language itself (it is instead about static vs dynamic typing). Java might be in this list too (usually the war is about OOP in general, but there's plenty of criticism levied at Java itself).

Discussions about C devolve into a religious war about simplicity and portability vs safety and an inadequate standard library.

Discussions about C++ devolve into a religious war about memory safety, bloat, developer competency, UB, and more.

Discussions about Haskell devolve into a religious war about powerful type systems and language constructs vs performance concerns, development complexity, and "endofunctors, lol."

Discussions about JS devolve into a religious war about npm, web dev in general, "== vs === lol" and more.

Discussions about Rust... oh boy.

In my experience, most discussions of specific components of languages inevitably spill into these broad and neverending religious wars.




Oh! I want to play too!

Discussions about Go devolve into a religious war about simplicity and portability vs "the creators of the language said its only for dum dums and it shows", "it took them 10+ years to get generics", and more.

Discussion about Zig devolve into a religious war about living in a universe where C exists and not wanting to write it versus "there's too many C-likes", "why isn't this Rust", and more.

Discussions about Erlang devolve into a religious war about standing up fault tolerant and scalable distributed systems, Joe was the nicest guy ever vs "you can do that in X all you have to do is Y".

Discussions about Elixir devolve into a religious war about Erlang and Ruby's love child, José Valim is the nicest guy ever versus "you can do that in X all you have to do is Y", "but what about types" and more.

Discussions about Clojure devolve into a religious war about people writing impressive programs in their spare time, "I actually get paid to write Clojure" versus "does anyone actually get paid to write Clojure".

Discussions about Elm devolve into a religious war about type safety and staying sane versus Richard Feldman lost his temper once, the 0.19 release and "everyone has Stockholm syndrome over there".

Discussions about V devolve into a religious war about "this is not a scam" versus "this is a scam".

Discussions about Nim generally don't, or the language creator is going off on D-forums / Twitter / X again.


Discussions about PHP inevitably end up in a "The language is better now" vs "You can still write this crap" loop. ;)


Yeah, absolutely. Ruby just has its own unique flavour of holy wars because it somehow manages to make people either to be totally enamoured with it or utterly sickened by it, with almost no middle ground ― which is quite an achievement TBF. So when the latter group reads something like "This is absolutely delightful! As a non-ruby developer I see things like this and get jealous of ruby developers", they can't help buy conclude that the other side is straight up demented and should probably be disallowed to handle sharp objects like scissors and monkey-patching, and the holy war may commence.




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