[jerf]

You, and most of the other repliers up to this point, haven't fully thought through the implications I was making when I said there can be more than one group of "elite".

Elite embedded programmers who have been using C for 20 years will have other characteristics that set them apart from the non-elite, but are not themselves the reason for them being elite embedded programmers. And so on for other groups of elite programmers. Language geeks are just a particularly visible manifestation of the process, because it's so easy for so many people to get into, and has such concrete effects. (Perhaps less so than when you were using Python when everyone else was still using C and you could program circles around them as long as performance wasn't an issue (which it frequently isn't), but I can still confidently say there are projects around where using Erlang (for instance) can put you well ahead of anybody using a language with a worse concurrency story, no matter how skilled in that language they are. There's a time and a place for superior primitives.)

[georgieporgie]

the implications I was making when I said there can be more than one group of "elite".

Uh. Where did you say that?