Is snobbery widespread among developers?

People instinctively defend their choices either consciously or subconsciously. It's a function of normal human ego. You don't have to relate this to programming languages and developers you could do that to other life choices such as; cars, foods, area of the country or world that you live in, etc...

There's nothing inherently wrong in that attitude. What you relate as snobbery could easily be viewed as evangelism. They like what they have, they like what they know and they're communicating that. In any kind of evangelistic approach you communicate both positives of the thing you like and the negatives of the thing that you're attempting to replace.

I could easily make the argument that how you chose to frame this question demonstrates the same ego that you're assigning to others because choosing the word snobbery as decidedly negative connotations to it.

Nah not snobby enough really, at least here and now under the jackboot of "let people enjoy things" culture.

I think the industry tends to be far too optimistic about technology ("if PHP was good enough for Facebook, then it's good enough for us") and far too pessimistic about people ("we can't switch to a better language because there's not enough talent out there. What do you mean, train them?")

The rare quadrant of tech-selective/people-generous is where the magic happens imo.

In a slightly different universe you'd have to have a certificate to be a "software engineer".

In this one there is no standard to meet to get into the industry. Some people have a CS education or the equivalent, other people really understand HTML and CSS and are valuable for that.

There are distinct communities of practice.

I've worked at some places that have a MSDN subscription and the world revolves around Microsoft products, some excellent, some junk. They thought "Linux is not ready for prime time".

I've also worked with Linux users who think "MS = shit" and are just as indiscriminate when it comes to open source.

I worked at a library that felt threatened by the electronic revolution (e.g. I went to the stacks recently to get a copy of the Tale of Genji and got personal service because I might have been the first person to use the stacks in a year) and faced a "glass ceiling" because I didn't have an MLS degree. Many devs work in situations like that, supervised by people who might not really get software, and that too is a source of conflict.

Sometimes I take it personally when I use systems that have bad user interfaces because it reminds me of times when I wasn't taken so seriously. (e.g. at least when I am involved a bad UI is not a failure of empathy on my part, but it might be a failure of understanding -- compounded by production pressures that don't let me revisit it.)

Given all those stresses and people looking at it from their personal points of view it is no wonder people are snobbish.

I think they're not snobby enough. Transitive dependency explosions and a lack of understanding the code you're consuming has serious impacts on the code you write, how it can be used and abused etc.

Snobbery is widespread among humans.

It's an intrinsic part of our pack-animal heritage to divide the world into an in-group and an out-group and then to fabricate arbitrary moral rules to justify that division.