> I can recite many of such stories; of people keeping up with their ten person team by coding whatever the team did during the day in 2-3 hours at night using

> I can recite many of such stories; of people keeping up with their ten person team by coding whatever the team did during the day in 2-3 hours at night using Squeak Smalltalk; about an old Lisp hacker working in a research setup with mostly Java colleagues and always estimating to need 10% of the time (and then actually making the estimate). So why aren’t we all using either of these two languages? Maybe it isn't about the language, primarily, but about the team? Maybe those super productive teams would have been successful with any language that gave them enough freedom? That would also explain why you can't switch your 20 Java developers to Smalltalk, and have them perform miracles of software engineering.