It is similar to a religion, because if everyone agrees to adopt the same reality, then there's easy communication and a shared background understanding that makes it easy for everyone to work together. Picking a religion is a society-wide coordination problem, and strategies of shaming and in-group/out-group exclusion make sense in this context, where they wouldn't about flavors of ice cream, for example. We see the same thing happening in tech all the time. I don't want to learn a new technology, which means I don't want you to learn it, because I don't want it to become something that engineers are expected to know. And so on.
The point is to understand that "right tool for the job" and "C++ for everything" are religious positions, too. There might even be a dominant religious position, which likes to style itself as just the disinterested rational viewpoint.
The FP folks might be a somewhat more fervent (crazy mathematical) sect, but there's no getting away from religion, though we can call it by other names (fashion, "best practices", ...).
The point is to understand that "right tool for the job" and "C++ for everything" are religious positions, too. There might even be a dominant religious position, which likes to style itself as just the disinterested rational viewpoint.
The FP folks might be a somewhat more fervent (crazy mathematical) sect, but there's no getting away from religion, though we can call it by other names (fashion, "best practices", ...).