[nobleach]

Compulsive intellectual thrill-seekers... while I never want to call names, this does seem to explain the phenomena quite well. There are just some people out there that need the world to know how smart they are.

Anecdotal: I do know one guy however who's just so ecstatic every time he figures new things out. To his way of thinking, everything that comes with "functional" truly is simpler. He built a dependency injector based on a Reader. He built a cool Result library where he managed to get at the internals of the JVM. Never once did he come off as holier than thou. I can appreciate and respect that.

[dkarl]

IMO "compulsive" is the damning word there. People who don't enjoy learning typically don't make good programmers, but you have to show respect for your coworkers when you choose your learning opportunities.