Many IT workers are smug. Programmers, network admins, DBAs, sysadmins, architects. They all think they know something that other people don't (which is sometimes true!) and then transmute that feeling into a sense of superiority, which funnily enough ends up limiting them.
All programming languages are garbage to me now. Even my favorite languages. Most systems, networks, databases, are garbage to me. Frameworks, architectures, patterns, paradigms, protocols, standards, conventions..... all garbage.
I now see the whole system as like a municipal waste treatment plant. If we work really hard, the highest thing we can aspire to is to prevent waves of unprocessed shit from exploding out a release valve into a nearby stream. Our work should be unglamorous and practical, because ultimately someone's going to have to drink our water, and making sure it doesn't have shit in it should be our highest priority.
It does, at least, mean that (most of) our work is honorable and honest: keep shit out of the drinking water, keep the lights on, provide data products to businesses or people in or people for them to make informed decisions about the (business) world around them.
I also agree that the disputes about language choices is tribalisitic. There's nothing wrong in principle with Java. But Java nuts do love creating factory-factory-factories. Layer upon layer of abstractions really doesn't confer simplicity.
Most recently, I've been a PHP developer. It's objectively an awful language, that has grown by accretion, and was never designed. But it's quick to write, reasonably easy to read, and there's pretty good documentation online, and a million tons of chunks of example code.
So my choice of language is essentially tribal; the details of the language aren't really important, as long as it's not getting in the way. It's the kinds of people that use the language that matters to me.
Java's reputation as a corporate language is well-deserved; and (with exceptions) the type of people that use it seem to be corporate drones, that don't mind spending a week writing a factory-factory-factory that nobody needs.
All programming languages are garbage to me now. Even my favorite languages. Most systems, networks, databases, are garbage to me. Frameworks, architectures, patterns, paradigms, protocols, standards, conventions..... all garbage.
I now see the whole system as like a municipal waste treatment plant. If we work really hard, the highest thing we can aspire to is to prevent waves of unprocessed shit from exploding out a release valve into a nearby stream. Our work should be unglamorous and practical, because ultimately someone's going to have to drink our water, and making sure it doesn't have shit in it should be our highest priority.