>> Tell me, how many Holy Wars have you seen fought over whether
>> strawberry icecream is better or worse than chocolate icecream? Uh, none.
>
> But how many Holy Wars have been fought over which invisible friend is
> more real?

All of them, AFAIK.

It seems that all of the big arguments aren't about anything objective, 
they're about what people believe.

> The people screaming "Language X is best!" are the people who really
> like X and who want to work with it in their next job, but who are
> afraid it won't be available to them because other technical or
> management people will decide against it on reasons of popularity. (How
> often I've heard "We can't use utterly appropriate language X because
> it's too hard to find programmers that know it, so let's use POS Y that
> has taken over the world due to historical and irrelevant reasons.)

Well, I suppose. (Or just the people who like to feel smug for having 
found the best tool first...)

>> As far as I'm aware, no mechanic actually gives a **** about the
>> difference.
>
> Of course they do. They don't fight over it because the tool is simple.
> Imagine whether a professional race car driver could argue over the
> merits of air-cooled turbo injection versus water-cooled turbo
> injection. The car is just a tool for the driver, after all.

While I'm sure many race car drivers have opinions about whether 
air-cooled or water-cooled is best, you never see them *argue* about it. 
They might say "my personal opinion is X", but you never see this "X is 
best, and anybody who says different is WRONG!" stuff.

>> 2. Some programming languages definitely *are* "better" than others,
>> in an objective way.
>>
>> For example, take BASIC. [...] The 1980s was a decade of 8-bit home
>> computers running BASIC. It's a great language for non-experts
>
> You just obviated your own claim here. Do you want to teach first-year
> programming in BASIC on a 8-bit computer, or C++? Objectively, BASIC is
> better for that, and indeed that's exactly BASIC's target audience.

For the fifty-eighth time, I clearly and obviously meant that BASIC is 
useless *as a programming language*. If you want to argue about its 
utility as a teaching aid, that's a different debate. (And, obviously, 
I'd suggest a logic or functional language as a first language, and 
everybody else would tell me I'm wrong.)

>> Determining which programming language is superior requires real
>> insight and intelligence. And if you fail to see why one language is
>> better than another, basically that means that YOU'RE STUPID.
>
> And now you understand all the other Holy Wars too. ;-)

Well, yeah, those are probably a bit more complex though. Nobody says 
"Python is an inferior language because Chinese people use it", for example.

>> Truth is, if you compare almost any pair of complex objects, usually
>> one is so clearly superior to the other that there's nothing to argue
>> about,
>
> Except, you know, Holy stuff.

That would be the other half of that sentence, yes.

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