[Zergy]

I've been running into this phenomenon a lot and its not isolated to java developers. We recently had a class on Clojure 101 and the main audience was Obj-C/Swift developers. A lot of the developers went into the class actively trying to prove Clojure was dumb and the way they were doing it was better.

I think any language one it reaches a critical mass attracts people who are not problem solvers but memorizers. There is a correlation between people who rely on copy pasting existing code and SO answers and people heavily invested in their language.

Point being most people who have trouble adopting other languages tend to be memorizers vs problem solvers and become insecure when working in a poorly defined environment. Pulling them into something new after others have solved the hard problems and created best practices tends to be easier and more productive for everybody.