Have you heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome?

Have you heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law?

It's very clearly not sarcasm.

If I cut off the limbs of a bunch of athletes and glue them together, it doesn't make a better athlete.

Maybe that's because gluing together limbs is still an open research issue while gluing together ideas is merely a mental excercise?

I hope you don't find analogies like that. It doesn't make sense to compare athletes to programming languages; that analogy makes no sense at all.

Also +1 to what @Padding says.

It's obviously not a precise analogy :)

However, it gets the point across; taking a bunch of bits from disparate well-functioning systems and smashing them together doesn't guarantee that you'll get another well-functioning system.

Depends on the sport.

Do you like Go? Part of the process for creating Go was to take the best parts of other languages and glue them together, while also throwing out as many features as possible.

Funny you should ask :) I'm best known for my article criticizing Go's design. I think Go is a reactionary language; it says "To hell with the last 30 years of language research; we want the good old K&R days back!" while making a few token admissions to progress (like good green threading). In reality, this approach eliminated everything that made C elegant (C is universally compatible with basically all Von Neumann computers, and Go certainly isn't) without actually taking advantage of 99% of the progress we've made. I'd hardly say Go has many of the "best parts" of other languages.

I think the part where you said "best bits" is debatable.