A Python presenter at a Java conference making fun of Java would be “punching up” - and if I was a Java programmer in the audience I might feel some camaraderie over it as you described. Others might think “oooh that’s brave!”
But the situation presented here is different - a Python presenter at a Python conference making fun of Java - that’s just straight tribalism.
Jokes have a lot of purposes but one of them is to enforce in/out groups. And a presenter at language conference X picking on language Y is reinforcing in-group/out-group.
lb
Re:Contempt Culture (2015)
by SpicyLemonZest on Wednesday September 15, 2021 @08:34PM
(#28546368)
Maybe that's the core difference. I can't imagine a Python programmer considering Java programmers to be a different tribe or an outgroup, and I don't think I've ever been in an environment where people think that way. To me it's like poking fun at a friend for eating chocolate ice cream when I only like vanilla.
There's a kind of self-deprecating humor that people engage in which is humorous to themselves and their community, but is insulting coming from other people. If the presenter was one of the people coming from Java to Python, the humor is reasonable. If the person has never written Java past their college courses and never worked in Java, then it's more insulting (or risking being more insulting) than humorous.
People really do rip on PHP from what I’ve seen. Not sure about Java developers though. I work on a node.js team and the only fun we made with an incoming Java dev was to joke that things will be easier now that he doesn’t have to worry about types. And then he switched us to using Typescript.
> I saw a presenter at a Python conference make fun of Java. How would that feel to people trying to move from Java into something else? I wouldn’t feel welcome, and I’d have learned that the idea that the Python community is welcoming wasn’t true.
and I feel exactly the opposite! Every Java programmer I know has a roster of "Java sucks" jokes; if a Python presenter made a good one, I'd feel like they're one of us and be more interested in the rest of what they have to say.
The author does mention they've been programming for substantially longer than me, so it could be there's a streak of true meanness somewhere that I've been lucky enough not to encounter, but I'm not really convinced it's common today or was common in 2015.