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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

People who dislike X are upset because they incorporated their favourite Y into their identity, and the success of X challenges their own choices.

True for football teams, political parties, games consoles, superhero franchises, religions, food choices, colour schemes, preferred spelling variants, ...

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Sometimes, sure. But none of those are our jobs (except if you are a football player, politician, etc).

Computer programming languages are our jobs. It's okay to have preferences. I (a full time front-end webdev), think Python is probably the best language out there. But it doesn't define me, because that's just silly.

I agree that a language doesn't define you but what I wonder if a person's favorite language has some correlation to certain personality traits. I would be lieing if I didn't say I get more enjoyment from some languages where other people don't. Perl vs Python for example, pythons core values are to try and make it only one way to achieve something, whereas Perl tries to give you multiple ways to achieve something. I would guess that Perl may appeal more to artistic people and Python would appeal to more engineering type of people. This isn't a claim, more just something I think would be interesting to investigate.

Ok, I write every day in Rust and JavaScript (and not just jumping monkey in JS, but a lot of code). They are almost orthogonal languages. Will it fit your theory? :)

Are they both your favorite languages? Also there will always be exceptions.

Sorry for long reply. No, I prefer Rust, but right now it's impossible to use Rust on frontend. I also know there are people who love Python, Scala, Nim, D, Ocaml and I don't think they are wrong - it's just languages with different flavours and there are people with other preferences, so it's awesome to have alternatives. They are not better or worse than me if they use other languages, I'm more than sure about it. But when we talk about PHP, Go, Perl - yes, I think people could make better choice.

That's actually an interesting philosophical question. I find the idea of "more than one way" extremely unappealing, so it's not particularly shocking that Python is my "ideal" language. To me it's either useless (all options have the same efficiency) or it's bad (one option is the most efficient). So it seems senseless.

And artistic is the last word I'd use to describe myself.

I should probably have added "job" to that list. People certainly define themselves by their jobs. Not everyone all the time, but you can see it cropping up somewhere all the time even within a company.

And job grades, job titles, job seniority, place of education, type of degree, ...

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