>> 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.

Then there are the people who, having spent ages going to the trouble of 
learning something, have a vested interest in claiming that it's the 
best. Because, you know, otherwise you'd be admitting that you wasted a 
whole crapload of effort learning an inferior tool.

>> 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.

 From what I've seen, generally racing drivers let the scoreboard speak 
for itself. They tend to argue about team politics far more than 
anything technological.

> 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).

Yeah, I suppose.

There aren't too many professions like programming where such a wide 
array of problems are attacked and there's no really objective way to 
decide which is the best tool for a given job. I mean, structural 
engineers tackle all kinds of weird structures, but there are rigorous 
mathematical models that tell you (for example) which kind of joint is 
the best choice for a particular set of loading conditions.

>> useless *as a programming language*.
>
> Again, I disagree.

Well, yeah, that's because *I* said it. :-P

> First, I expect more production code has been written
> in BASIC than Haskell.

By which measurement? Number of applications? Number of lines of code? 
What counts as "production"? Which dialects of BASIC count? (For 
example, where I work, we have a 4,000 line QBasic monstrosity which we 
use for scientific work, for reasons beyond my comprehension. Does 
QBasic count? Or is that too modern?)

I'm doubtful that BASIC has more production code than Haskell in terms 
of number of lines of code. OTOH, since I have no scientific data on 
which to decide either way, it's kind of an empty point.

> 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.

Excel macros, makefiles and shell scripts are all strictly more powerful 
than BASIC in at least one objective way: they all support recursion. 
BASIC does not.

>> 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? ;-)

Hehe, yeah, I've certainly seen that argument used. ;-)

>>>> 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.

I said "when you compare two things, usually one is obviously superior 
to the other, *or* both have their uses". Which seems pretty 
uncontroversial to me.

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