I would like to add a corollary to this theorem. The best programmers are also willing to work with the annoying technologies -- although they will gripe (healt

I would like to add a corollary to this theorem. The best programmers are also willing to work with the annoying technologies -- although they will gripe (healthily) about them. It's all a balancing act. There is a type of programmer who could be great, but is merely good because they refuse to use or deal with annoying techs. Sometimes, you just have no choice, and brute forcing past the annoying is by far the most efficient solution. You all know this type. They are the kind of guy that exclusively used the Next (or Amiga), and ran windows in VM Ware on a bleeding edge Debian install in 2000 -- When the software they were being paid to develop was compiled in Visual Studio! That's the thing. I hate MSFT. I hate Windows. I'll avoid using it. But... if the task requires that a regular PC GUI app be written, I'll use Visual Studio. Although I have been known to ask less PC phobic employees to handle this part of the job :-) Of course, I also decided for an entire series of Playstation 2 games to forego doing the normal thing (using C/C++) and wrote my own Scheme compiler/debugger/environment. And of course, this quickly spiraled into several man years of work (on my part). It did come out pretty well. We did four games, and they sold tens of millions of copies -- dozens of programmers used the system and it was pretty cool. But boy was it stressful. I really should have figured out a way of solving my problems that didn't require so much custom programming to solve a sub-problem of my task. My main task was: Program an absolutely fantastic 3D action game in 2-3 years. I got sidetracked by the theory that "C/C++ sucks for writing highly customized game code" and that the compile/link/run cycle of 10+ minutes made iterative testing (which is the mother of all good gameplay) slow. This is all true, but it's a less focused problem than making a great game. Avoiding this or that technology, or using this or that more fun one is not the same as getting the job done. That being said, programming in Lisp, or Ruby feels like walking on water compared to C/C++'s being wrapped in chains and pushed off the boat. You just don't want to stroll off toward Australia when your gig is in Japan.