My story:

I'm a pragmatic person. Sometimes, the most simple solution to a problem to get the job done is the one that fits best for me, if its not an utter blasphemy and reproach to any design principles. Check out my answer to this question on stackoverflow. Simple. Works. Was accepted. Could be improved. Is clearly not perfect. And along comes this guy. He downvotes me, comments on the question how his answer is better, more accurate etc and calls me "plain wrong". Reminds me of this comic strip. :-)

While on stackoverflow I can laugh at these things because those people are far away, in the real world I'm suffering from ideologies every now and then. Heck, I'm not creating a miracle piece of software, I need to keep that huge legacy thing running, and it's an adventure to me every day. I don't have the time or passion to beautify my code (or other people's code) to that extent.

My question(s):

• How do you deal with ideologies / ideologists, when you're a pragmatic person?
• How do you deal with pragmatism / pragmatists, when you're an ideologic person?

I'm interested in both point of views. Tell me your experience. But please, be fair, somewhat objective, and understand that you may NOT be entirely correct and your opinion is NOT the only true one... :-)