How to deal with a difficult programmer on an open source project

The thing that made me just about ready to pack my bags and go was the push script. Another developer on the project wrote a simple Python-based push script. Since we keep multiple versions of the script online in various places, I began coding a larger Java program with a graphical interface that would replace the Python script. I went on IRC to notify everyone about it, and I got a very annoying response from the programmer saying that the old Python-based script can do everything mine can do and is so much more lightweight (he also commented about the fact that he thought Python was better than Java and so on). I looked over the code for the old push script and saw that none of the features he said existed were there.