[bryanrasmussen]

When programmers have learned a particular language really well and they encounter a problem the language does not handle well it is usual for them to want to add some capability to the language to handle their problem rather than going off and learning a new language, often because the constraints of time does not let them learn the new language.

There is a tendency to think of pragmatism as throwing away core values in order to solve a problem, although generally this is in the use of the word pragmatism in the domains of business or politics and not in the domain of programming language extensibility.