Fanatic Oriented Programming May Work

RalphJohnson said this on the XpMailingList (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/extremeprogramming/message/33020):

: Someone told me once that the best kind of programming was "fanatic oriented programming". If all the people on the project think that OOP/Java/Ruby/Lisp/XP/whatever) is the most wonderful thing in the world, they will come to work excited and have a great time working together. Although overenthusiasm has its own problems, the guy had a point. Your project will avoid many kinds of problems if people who work on it love their job.

A problem is then left for those who cannot force themselves to buy into it. Is there a drug that will make me go gaga over Extreme XML Object Aspect Web Services?

In chapter 3 of RiseAndResurrectionOfTheAmericanProgrammer, page 63, EdwardYourdon gives some statistics from studies about OOP projects. It seems that early OO projects were measurably more successful, but later ones did not score higher than the average score. Yourdon's speculation for this change is that early projects had more "fanatics" on them, but later ones had a more mixed crowd who got into OO for money instead of a personal like. This implies that a programmer's personal preference is more important to getting results than the language or paradigm itself.