Science Quote by Niklaus Wirth

Wirth’s jab lands because it treats “programming language tribalism” not as a cute quirk of geeks, but as a cognitive mistake with real engineering costs. The religion analogy is familiar: you convert, you evangelize, you defend doctrine, you frame alternatives as heresy. His twist is to call that analogy itself a fallacy. He’s not praising pluralism in the abstract; he’s warning that the metaphor smuggles in a false premise: that languages are identity commitments rather than tools, constraints, and tradeoffs.

Coming from Wirth, that matters. This is a designer of languages (Pascal, Modula) and systems who watched fashions harden into camps. In that world, “style” becomes moralized: static vs. dynamic typing, functional vs. imperative, minimalism vs. feature-richness. Once the debate is moral, evidence loses. You stop asking, “What does the problem require?” and start asking, “What kind of person uses that?” The subtext is pragmatic and slightly impatient: engineers should be bilingual by default, because different paradigms expose different bugs, afford different abstractions, and teach different ways of thinking.

The rhetoric is clean: “Many people tend” softens the accusation, then “like religions” delivers the sting, then “another fallacy” flips the frame and reasserts a scientist’s priority - falsifiable claims over belonging. It’s a reminder that programming culture, at its worst, confuses taste with truth and loyalty with competence.