I thought the same way when I got out of college, but changed my mind after a decade or so in the industry. What changed could be neatly summed up by this post

I thought the same way when I got out of college, but changed my mind after a decade or so in the industry. What changed could be neatly summed up by this post: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr... Basically, I used to program for the intellectual challenge and the thrill of programming itself. If that's your goal, by all means use Scala or Haskell or Lisp. But at some point that faded, and now I program because somebody has a problem that they will pay me to solve or (for various startup ideas) because I want to understand the market or some data source that has the potential to be worth a lot to a lot of people. For these, my focus is on the problem - the programming is a means to an end for solving the problem, and so anything that lets me spend less brainpower on the programming and more brainpower on the problem domain is a net win.