alt Hacker NewsI think that's an incredibly ignorant and hostile read, frankly. It's a manifold of human behaviors manifesting as something you're painting with a large brush. In the largest stroke, if you have any empathy and a competent theory of mind, you understand it's simple identity protectionism. People attach their identities to their methodologies and tools, and are generally close-minded. I like to think of it like an energy saving trait hardwired into the human mind, even if it's a little bit annoying.
The behavior also isn't unique to programming at all. You can observe it in the various engineering fields. As a single example, in civil engineering you have the conflict between allowable stress design or load and resistance factor design. You even see the behavior in fields like medicine. Different doctors have different views on different methodologies, treatments, etc.
Ascribing it to the "youth" of programming as a field is strange, not just because of its observability in older professions, but because the things you're complaining about are things that emerged as the field got more mature.
I think there's a serious self-flagellation problem some programmers have for themselves after being talked down to by other fields that you're exemplifying here. There's nothing particularly unique about the social dynamics of programming.
I have literally seen this firsthand enough to consider it repeatable. I am not making up characters for effect. I have seen and worked with people who didn’t want to write tests because they thought it made them appear weak. I have seen people say they use Ruby because they “don’t want a compiler holding their hand” as if a compiler diminished them personally (I have nothing against Ruby specifically).
Programming is a young field compared to basically all the others. It is immature. It is undergoing massive change quickly. It does have an immature, barely developed theory of practice. This has weird effects, just like how other disciplines had weird quirks when they were young too. What was young medicine like?
I have a great deal of empathy and respect for programmers. Same for engineers and doctors. None are infallible. Doesn’t change my read that our (programming) culture could be better than it is in specific ways, which could result in better decision making in the aggregate.
As for your last point, I agree! I’ve worked too closely with them for there to be any mystique left. I don’t want programming to become civil engineering or medicine but I think we can learn things from how they think about quality and systems. They’ve had more practice at it.