[bitblender]

It is "personal" if you attach someone's technical opinion to broader implications about their own competence. If you disagree with a technical opinion, say so and move on, there is no reason to even discuss someone's own personal skillset, experience, or value as a developer. It's a silly fallacy to automatically label people who disagree with you as incompetent. All it does is foster bias and stifle actual discussion. The responses to this post are evidence that this is not as cut and dry as the original posts suggests, so I suggest we try our best not to cover our ears and embrace tribalism just because we think less of someone's opinion. I don't think I'm being oversensitive by saying this is unproductive dogmatism. It is my honest opinion, yet I do not extrapolate to mean anything about the proponents' value as a developer. Unconscious bias is a pervasive problem for everyone, especially when it comes to binary holy wars like static vs. dynamic types. This is more akin to a builder who uses a nail gun rather than a hammer. Hammer enthusiasts can either acknowledge that both approaches have tradeoffs or they can petulantly insist that people who don't use their methods aren't "real" builders.

[mvdtnz]

I'm sorry but this is a discussion about their competence. You can't separate someone's opinions on technical topics from their competence in the very technical field you're discussing. If a cartographer has the "opinion" that the world is flat then that directly speaks to their competence as a cartographer.

[bitblender]

For starters, "the world is flat" is falsifiable and trivially disproven with evidence. "Dynamic types are better" is neither of these. If you're going to pin someone's professional value to a single technical opinion, you should at least be able to back it up with data.