I used to feel this way, but found it to be an unproductive model until I realized something: sure, most people are kinda stupid and sufficiently intelligent p

I used to feel this way, but found it to be an unproductive model until I realized something: sure, most people are kinda stupid and sufficiently intelligent people can make many tools work for them. But most people's actions are driven _very_ heavily by their tools, and from a pragmatic perspective, criticizing tooling that drives bad actions for the average engineer makes a lot of sense. As an example: I recently ran a small engineering org (started out with just me, grew to about ten eng) working on a Python system. The founders had a lot of trouble sourcing, so we ended up with engineers that ranged from okay to mediocre to terrible. There's a ton of dangerous Python footguns that competent engineers have the discipline to avoid; engineering in Python at Google isn't exactly fun, but it's workable. OTOH, trying to run an engineering system in Python with the kind of engineers at this last company is a constant nightmare of catching and stopping idiotic abuses of Python's flexibility. Using something like Java would have imposed discipline on this engineers for a subset of the mistakes they were making. While it's true that sufficiently skilled engineers would've been aware of Python's pitfalls and worked around them, it's entirely fair to say that this permissiveness is a downside of engineering systems in Python. As another example, I feel exactly the same way about Facebook: for all the talk about how usage makes you depressed and scrolling through the newsfeed is bad for your mental health, I'm able to use it as a messaging, photo sharing, and event planning platform and can't remember the last time I looked at the news feed. That doesn't mean that it's unfair to criticize Facebook for the effect it has on those who can't resist doing so. To put it more concisely: while it's true that smart/competent people can think critically about the weaknesses of their tools and work around them, the need to do so is fairly described as a flaw in the tool.