Why are there so many language wars-lovers in some open source communities...?
Probably the same reason the French don't like the English or the Indians don't like the Pakistanis. The closer two things are to each other, the more passionate people are about the differences.
My experience is that all the languages are identical. Python has a culture of cleanliness at the core, but there is a lot missing from the language that makes it unclean in practices. (See: the investment bank I worked where all new apps were written in a C#/C++/Python trialect, to coin a new word.) Perl is a very messy language, but the community has hyper-overreacted and have made a very clean set of "best practices". I haven't done much Ruby, but I can't say anything other than that it looks like a combination of Perl and Python, with a relatively new community around it.
These three languages are largely the same thing: they run slow and they're fun to write. Hence all the infighting.
Learning a language is an investment. People defend their investment strategies lest they be considered a fool. Attacking alternatives is a form of defense. I fear it's as simple as that.
Can't speak for all of them, but if a language has "there's more than one way to do it" as its main motto, I guess the people from the ecosystem are less likely to attack other languages.
Probably the same reason the French don't like the English or the Indians don't like the Pakistanis. The closer two things are to each other, the more passionate people are about the differences.
My experience is that all the languages are identical. Python has a culture of cleanliness at the core, but there is a lot missing from the language that makes it unclean in practices. (See: the investment bank I worked where all new apps were written in a C#/C++/Python trialect, to coin a new word.) Perl is a very messy language, but the community has hyper-overreacted and have made a very clean set of "best practices". I haven't done much Ruby, but I can't say anything other than that it looks like a combination of Perl and Python, with a relatively new community around it.
These three languages are largely the same thing: they run slow and they're fun to write. Hence all the infighting.