[gruseom]

In my 35 years of software work, far, far too often I see people concentrating on the pointless

The pointless has one great advantage: it is easier to work with. Hard problems are The Unknown, we fear the unknown, and when this fear arises one way to resolve it is by replacing the hard problem with something easier. This is absurd, like the drunk looking for his car keys under the street lamp on the wrong side of the street "because the light's better here", but that doesn't stop us, it just means we do it unconsciously. Now we have a simpler problem that we can concentrate on and (best of all) argue about.

You see this in obvious places like curly brace wars, but there are more interesting examples, such as why editors and version control systems get so much attention. They're important, but not that important. But they're easy to understand and have an opinion about. Better still, they're common across many projects so arguing about them is a way for programmers to socialize.

Perhaps the same pattern is behind our industry's tendency to embrace savior paradigms (Structured Programming, OO, Agile, FP).