Invisible wrote:
>> 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...)

Oh, and another frequent cause is when it's really difficult to learn a tool 
well, like C++ or vi, and someone has gone to that effort, then they either 
assume that every *other* tool will be equally difficult (if they learned 
the difficult one first) or that you'd like it just as much if only you 
understood it.  The latter being a *very* holy kind of approach.

> 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. 

Really?  How do you know?

Plus, their *job* is to argue over which is best.

> They might say "my personal opinion is X", but you never see this "X is 
> best, and anybody who says different is WRONG!" stuff.

That's a rather strong claim.

In any case, that was a kind of poor example, because everyone is trying to 
optimize for the same thing in race driving (i.e., winning the race 
according to the rules).

Do you not see arguments over which sports is best? Which brand of car is 
best? Why do you think a bunch of race car drivers wouldn't get together and 
loudly discuss whose car is better?


> useless *as a programming language*. 

Again, I disagree. First, I expect more production code has been written in 
BASIC than Haskell. Second, this would be saying that every other language 
of similar capabilities is useless as a programming language, which is 
clearly false if you look at (say) Excel macros, makefiles, or shell scripts.

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

.NET is inferior because it comes from Redmond? ;-)

>>> 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.

I would disagree on that.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

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