[wwatson]

The sadist (causing anxiety to the other in order to get the other to announce the rules) wants the other to admit their impotence (in the way that the other develops software). The erlang community wants the other to admit that they can't develop software that has nine nines of availability.

[DonHopkins]

Isn't it sadistic the way Perl and Bash are so ideal for developers gaining control over their employers and ensuring job security by making themselves indispensable (forcing their employers to admit their impotence of firing them) by writing obscure unmaintainable code that only they can understand and modify?

You can do that in any language, of course, but Perl and Bash are are optimized for it.

While the other hand, Java is designed to appeal to management by making software developers fungible easily disposable worker-bees.

[b2gills]

I've heard about a merger between two companies.

One use Java, the other used Perl.

At some point both teams were told that they had to add a particular feature.

The Perl team was done well before the Java team.

This was a story from one of the Perl trainers. I don't remember enough about the rest of the video in order to find it online.

[lizmat]

If we're talking about the same thing: this was about merging their databases, so that either could sell the other company's inventory. Both had an XML-interface for affiliates. It took the Perl team about 3 weeks to be able sell the other company's inventory using the XML-interface. The other company at that point hadn't agreed on a date for a initial design meeting yet.

By this, the company of the Perl team almost doubled its turn-over in 3 weeks. The other company ceased to exist a few years later, with most of its staff integrated in the company with the Perl team.

[TheOtherHobbes]

I'd have thought C++ was the poster-perversion for this. The community wants users to admit they can't develop software at all.