| I can't remember where I heard this, but the idea is that every hobby X is secretly more like four sub-hobbies: 1. People who like to do X 2. People who like to tinker with the stuff around X 3. People who like to talk about doing X 4. People who like to talk about the stuff around X For X you can substitute biking, cars, whatever, but for this discussion, X is "programming". 1. Some people like to program 2. Some people like to tinker with shells and editors and languages and frameworks 3. Some people like to talk about programming 4. Some people like to talk about the tools of programming Of course people don't fall neatly into one of these buckets for a given hobby, but we certainly tend towards some subset of them. Your "status-chasers" may just be folks who tend towards bucket #4 when it comes to software stuff. |