So if you don't drink you're not a person? Alcohol is generally prohibited in Islam. Are you going to tell me that there are entire nations inhabited by human non-people?
Even including Islamic countries in the set, drinking is still one of the most prominent ways people in general socialize on average.
If that were true that would be bad - drinking at conferences would then truly alienate non-drinkers. But actually, non-drinkers can participate just fine in one of the most prominent ways people socialize.
In this particular case, it's more likely that the grandparent meant "this is something that most people do — programmers are not unusual in this regard, so it's weird to single them out."
ctide didn't say anything of the sort. I think ctide was trying to generalise from programmers -> people not implying all of humanity.
I have seen this phenomena (?) of "binge conferences" in many other circles - medical, engineering, accounting, legal. Journalism.. the list goes on, so it is a fair point.
Away from home, why not have a few drinks.
I'd bet $5 that the tap at GitHub isn't used to binge (as much as the author thinks). It's like a foosball table, used for a week straight, then forgot about.
Arguments of the type of "well, I've seen lots of people do this" just smell of availability bias. I can't argue that you're wrong, but you haven't given a good enough argument for me to conclude that you're correct.
The OP, on the other hand, is much more of a "Well, I've seen lots of people do this" argument: It's explicitly based on his personal experience with conferences.