[jrockway]

I've seen it from the following communities: PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python, Java, C++, C, C#, Haskell, Emacs, Vim, Common Lisp, and Scheme.

People are tribal. Some people are attracted to tribes, become attached without really knowing why, and start having the strong urge to fuck with the other tribes. Apparently this was good for the survival of the human race. Perhaps it's a bug now that we should consciously compensate for, like the desire to eat a box of doughnuts. mmm.... doughnuts... Good when you were a caveman. Bad when you sit in front of a desk for 16 hours a day and sleep for the other 8.

What's the alternative to scaling an application by running multiple copies? Scaling an application by running multiple threads? Exact same thing. The only advancement over this model is when the runtime can automatically parallelize your code, and you actually scale linearly when it does that. In the mean time, if you use a database server and not an in-memory database, guess what, you're "using queues" and "scaling by starting processes". People do it because it's easy and it works.

[wyuenho]

This whole thread/process/event queue non-sense is really ruining my appetite. Mmm fried bacon sausage wrap on a stick…

Guess what. When the packets come in from the network, they sit in an event queue. When Apache takes a request event, it takes it from a queue and hand off to a process. If you are proxying, the webapp server in the back takes the request events from a queue and hands off to a thread. When you make a DB call, the SQL goes to an event queue and the DB processes them 1 by 1. Real world web apps will always, is always and have always been done in a combination of event queues/threads and processes.

Nothing to see here. Moving on… oh look! Takoyaki!

[skeptical]

__People are tribal. Some people are attracted to tribes, become attached without really knowing why, and start having the strong urge to fuck with the other tribes. Apparently this was good for the survival of the human race. Perhaps it's a bug now that we should consciously compensate for__

That this tribal behavior occurs among software engineering is a rather disappointing fact. Computers are pretty much the edge of technology in many aspects, technological achievements by Mankind should be the prove that we're able to use our brains in more advanced ways than basic instincts and produce great achievements like modern software.

This flood of programmers that prefers to join a tribe instead of enjoying the good things from many different 'tribes' just makes me wonder how many of us are really devoted to do something useful/positive.

[generalk]

  > That this tribal behavior occurs among software engineering 
  > is a rather disappointing fact. 

It occurs amongst software engineering humans. All humans get this to some degree, it's basic ingroup/outgroup psychology.

We're all humans here. It's nothing to do with "devoted to doing something positive" or "using our brains in more advanced ways." It's just the reality of being an evolved ape, and the lack or presence of this trait doesn't make anyone any better/worse than anyone else.

[jrockway]

Yes, thank you for writing this. We are all humans, even if we don't want to be, and we have to think about our actions in the context of our genetic programming. In the case of tribalism, even though it's a strong feeling, we have to ignore it because it doesn't get us anything in programming language debates.

The best attitude to have is one of acceptance and an open mind, because the right programming tool applied to the right problem can make solving that problem orders of magnitude less difficult. You can have programmer friends even if you don't unconditionally hate the enemy. In fact, it seems, most people don't care about who you don't hate.