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Comment by mybrid | Hacker News Reader

TLDR; humans are tribal

American politics has regressed on a scale of civilized to tribal. This is something we can all intuit and I think articles like this are going to become more common place. How do humans overcome base nature to become civilized? This is poorly understood. Religion wants to take all the credit. People like Stephen Pinker point to the Enlightenment being responsible and Enlightenment under attack today is civilization under attack. The fact our culture is coarsening into ever larger degrees of tribalism is disturbing. Computer science will not be able to stay out of the fray. Nor will any human endeavour.

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I think it has more to do with the emotional investment into learning a programming language.

If you are a bit experienced and/or educated, you can learn most languages fairly quickly. I'm fairly confident that most programmers will become reasonably productive with using a new language in under a month.

The issue is however that many of us don't want to be just "reasonably productive". We are nerds who really love what we do and take pride in our craft. So we want to dive deeper and deeper, reach competency and expertise and increase the fun we have continuously.

This part of continuous learning and refinement is rewarding but also really hard. A particular language can get in the way of that or help us to become better in some dimension of expertise. There is a mindset behind a language that might fit ours like a glove, it just flows more naturally.

But this emotional investment can sometimes hinder us in the long run, when we invest so much time and effort into something we don't like to hear that our choice was arbitrary or even bad in some way or another.

The antidote do that is to keep learning new languages and technologies at a reasonable pace. Suddenly the emotional attachment fades.

In a cultural perspective emotional investment is commensurate with tradition, norms and mores. That is human nature that any endeavor will take on the trappings of our evolutionary heritage. Programming languages are no different. Taboos and other tribal patterns apply. It doesn't do the computing community any favor pretending this is just about learning.

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