> Rubyists vs. Pythonistas isn't any better.

Eh, in different ways. Ruby people often felt a little smug/over-emotive about how much joy using their tool could bring programmers. TFA is spot on about Perl: Perl folks often felt cliquish, arrogant, defensive. Python people are at times patronizing or overly dismissive.

And in all of those communities the biggest difference was how many people in the community had those dysfunctions, versus the rest—the vast majority of each language’s users who were using it, sharing techniques or code, answering questions about it without being jerks.

Where Perl fell down for me was that its community and people I knew who used it had a much higher chance of evidencing those crappy behaviors. More bad apples—not many in the grander scheme, but enough more to be noticed.