Why I hate calling myself "pragmatic" but do

I wrote a post on my personal blog about my being a “pragmatist”.

I mention it here because few words are as controversial, I think, in the programming community, as “pragmatic”. I wanted to be on record as identifying myself as “pragmatic” despite the negative connotations, because the entire mindset of this new programming blog is pragmatic.

For example, I will soon write about the realities of programming language choice, including why I used Java, despite its deficiencies, for a decade, and why it is not going away, and why I currently am an advocate of Scala, one of the most ambitiously pragmatic languages to have come along in my lifetime.