In my experience, programmers obsessed with unconventional programming languages are exactly the …

I've had the opposite experience. Our competition used a "boring" Ruby on Rails architecture, so they were burning investment capital on cloud hosting every month, meaning they were forced to rush for milestones and cut corners so that they could grasp the next piece of funding before their runway ran out. Meanwhile our "esoteric" codebase meant we could run everything on a couple of servers we owned and spend our time building stuff there was an actual business need for. So we were the ones who got a big acquisition while they crashed and burned. I mean, if you're looking at Facebook then you should look at WhatsApp too.

> Facebook was written in PHP. Mark used one language he knew and a $300B company was built on top of it. This example doesn't further your point at all seeing as they had to over time literally invent an entirely new language to make their PHP codebase scale. And on top of that FB went on to use a whole bunch of uncommon languages (Haskell, Erlang, D, probably a bunch of others I don't know about)

Also I've found that teams that focus on easily understandable languages (Python I think is the best with its "executable pseudocode" syntax) are those that are placing value on teamwork rather than individual flexing.

> Why should I waste my energy on learning a new language, especially when it can fade into obscurity and the output is going to be the same anyway? I used that reasoning to keep writing perl when python suddenly seemed everywhere and over-hyped. To be honest, I probably should have just taken the time to learn python sooner. I haven't abandoned perl, and I doubt I ever will, but it would have saved me some time/trouble to have picked up python earlier since it wasn't the fad I assumed it was. Today, I assume Rust is just a fad so I'm tempted to avoid the same mistake and pick that up too. Haven't bothered yet though.