After listening Robert Trivers' talk on deception, I began wondering about self-deception, bias and programming languages. Bias in the sense of favoring arguments that support your view and vice-versa.

The bias is worst for things that you have already made up your mind. Say you are choosing a college. Before choosing one, you probably weigh the alternatives quite critically and might even experience some anxiety over the choice. But once you've made up your mind, ie. chose to go to a certain college, you just ignore everything negative about it and endorse all positive tidbits you hear regarding it.

This all happens mostly unconsciously. Even if you know about it, it's extremely hard to take it into account. (Let alone if you don't know about it.) You'd have to always be consciously aware of this bias and deliberately take it into the calculation.

Another example would be a so called we-bias. You belong to a group and then there's everyone else. If a member of your group does something positive, say, gives a donation to a charity, you tend to generalize: "Bob is such a generous guy." Whereas if it's not a member of your group, you tend to be very specific: "Alice gave a small donation." And vice versa for negatives. Member of your group: "Bob stumped into Ned." Not a member of your group: "Alice is so hostile."

Again, this happens mostly unconsciously. You probably have to be a researcher, or at least an outside observer, to tap into this phenomenon. You're very unlikely to notice your own bias. (Unless you specifically look for it; a rare occasion I would assume.) Self-deception is a very strong power. As Trivers noted, it's likely that a selective force was in favor of genuine self-deception, because one is undoubtedly a better liar if one isn't aware of one's lying. And, boy, is lying good for your breeding prospects or what!

All this deception and group bias must be going on in programming language communities, too. And I'd argue that there isn't a simple cure for it. You might think you're immune to such deception, but, then again, you might be just cheating yourself. You see, you are prone to deception and bias if you have taken sides, so to speak. In other words: you are biased, if you have a favorite programming language.

No matter how hard you try to be objective, you probably still aren't. No matter how diverse you think your views are —if you still have a favorite programming language (or two)— you probably are biased.

I think the deception and especially bias is apparent in the way programming language communities are hostile to other, inferior languages. Once you've made your personal decision (which you might of course change later) on a preferred programming language, you tend become dismissive about the relative weaknesses of your language and you tend to emphasize to strengths of your language. What's more, you probably become extremely critical about other languages.

People can look for good ideas and strengths in other languages, but they do think that "their language" is one some sense the "best language", at least for them. They feel as if there was a genuinely all-around better language out there, they'd switch to it, immediately. But I would assume that this is not the case.

There are exceptions to this rule, of course, but if you're now thinking "yeah, that's me", I wouldn't be so sure about it. I am pretty sure I am biased and self-deceptive, especially on this subject!

And frankly, I don't know if this is such a bad thing, after all. Sure, self-deception and bias distort your objectivity and decisions, but it is so hard to always fight against self-deception. And once you've made your decision, you're probably going to stick with it for a while and knowing your language very well is good for your productivity. Furthermore, you can always explore other languages; it's just that you won't probably make objective and balanced observations of other languages. Get used to it.