snigger
I’m now trying to figure out what FORTRAN would be… 
Amish.
That’s amusing. Where does Unix/Linux fit in, I wonder.
Actually, from the way people defend their favorite language, it would seem that computer languages are a religion. My favorite programming language died because the clergy that controlled it wouldn’t let it grow. It did only integer arithmetic, for example (that is neither fixed nor floating point) and, while anyone could add arithmetic capabilities and did, there were no standard interface and code was not movable. It lacked string handling entirely and the same comments apply. It incorporated a principle of non-contamination: no standard program could import data collected by another language. Its standard editor was utterly simple and unusable. So although the languae was in some ways the best I ever used, it died from fundamentalism. Anyone who knows it will recognize it from my description: Forth.
The other language I use today is not really a language, but sometimes using it makes it seem so: TeX, more precisely the variety called LaTeX, a markup language not dissimilar to HTML, but specialized for mathematics. I mix LaTeX code with plain TeX code shamelessly and, whenver I post my solutions to problems, I get excoriated for my impurity. No one has ever given me a convincing reason for this, so I can only see it as religious.
I saw something on a newsgroup that said Unix was Judaism in that system, though I can’t find it now.
If programming languages were religions, I would be a fundamental binary assemblist.
From my limited experience with it, IDL (inclusive of ENVI) would have to be something like a revival meeting or a mega-church. That’s not quite right, but I’m not familiar enough with religious movements/sects to come up with a more fitting specific. Here’s why:
[ul]
[li]It seems to be an amalgam of influences; however, its foundations are pasted together with little to no organizing principles (I mean, really…a modern language that – only sometimes! – indexes starting with 1?).[/li][li]Much of its attraction lies in its flashy display.[/li][li]A large contingent of its adherents focus on heavenly bodies.[/li][li]It’ll cost you some serious coin.[/li][li]Many of its adherents lack even basic understanding of underlying (programming language) structure/theory (though, of course, this might be said to be a universal trait).[/li][li]Nonetheless, it’s very good at fulfilling its niche.[/li][/ul]
Personally, I’m in the odd camp of practicing “fundamentalist chrisitianity”, although I’m neither a fundamentalist nor a “christian”. Rather, I bounce among judaism, voodoo, islam, and zen, even with some dabbling in “primal indigenous” (sh/csh/bash/bat scripting; haven’t yet used AppleScript), numerology (assembly), pythagoreanism (prolog), and unitarianism (forth; I’m thinking of how one pretty much defines your own dictionary as you go along).
Whatever works…I suppose “pragmatist” is the best description.