Many of the super programmers at google have PL research backgrounds! Like Jeff Dean. Most of the others are in systems, which are fairly aligned, and often both. Such PL enthusiasts are the last ones to try and switch the language being used.
> Such PL enthusiasts are the last ones to try and switch the language being used.
As a PL enthusiast myself, I agree with this.
By the time I had my first job out of college, I'd written programs in some twenty-odd different PLs, and felt comfortable with many of them. My employer needed me to learn SAS, so I did. They wanted some code written in Java, so I wrote it. Neither SAS nor Java is particularly fun to program in the way Haskell et al. are, but that's what they wanted, and I could do it.
There was a whole team of Java guys, and when asked to learn SAS they sat around bemoaning it and whining about how Java is so much better. "Why not just do it in Java?" they asked.
I've run into similar experiences at every company since. If people don't want Java, they want C++ or Perl. If someone writes a utility in Python, there are complainers. Some programmers will refuse to even use a particular program if it's not written in their language of choice.
In my experience, it's usually the people who aren't PL enthusiasts that are more opinionated about language choice, simply because they're less flexible.
