"Religious issues" in hardware and software

Apparently, it's not just politics that is the mind-killer. When it comes to one's tool of choice, one can get as irrationally fanatical as it gets. From the Jargon Dictionary

“What is the best operating system (or editor, language, architecture, shell, mail reader, news reader)?”, “What about that Heinlein guy, eh?”, “What should we add to the new Jargon File?”

Great holy wars of the past have included ITS vs.: Unix, Unix vs.: VMS, BSD Unix vs.: System V, C vs.: Pascal, C vs.: FORTRAN, KDE vs, GNOME, vim vs. elvis, Linux vs. [Free|Net|Open]BSD. Hardy perennials include EMACS vs.: vi, my personal computer vs.: everyone else's personal computer, ad nauseam.

The characteristic that distinguishes holy wars from normal technical disputes is that in a holy war most of the participants spend their time trying to pass off personal value choices and cultural attachments as objective technical evaluations. This happens precisely because in a true holy war, the actual substantive differences between the sides are relatively minor.

A bigot: a person who is religiously attached to a particular computer, language, operating system, editor, or other tool (see religious issues). Usually found with a specifier; thus, Cray bigot, ITS bigot, APL bigot, VMS bigot, Berkeley bigot. Real bigots can be distinguished from mere partisans or zealots by the fact that they refuse to learn alternatives even when the march of time and/or technology is threatening to obsolete the favored tool. It is truly said “You can tell a bigot, but you can't tell him much.”

So, why's that? We're talking highly educated, intelligent, creative people here. People whom programming keeps honest, who have learned to decorticate and take apart every notion and every argument into its simplest components, in order to be able to properly communicate with mindless machines. Maybe I'm being naïve here, but I'd have thought fanaticism, in these circles, should be extinct.

So why isn't it? Why is the sanity waterline seem so low, and how does one raise it?

(Also, compare with console wars)