This is something I come back to repeatedly when attempting to evaluate claims about certain technologies (e.g. programming languages) being extravagantly effec

This is something I come back to repeatedly when attempting to evaluate claims about certain technologies (e.g. programming languages) being extravagantly effective: people's sentiments about how great some technology is often seems out of proportion to what their gains were through using it. Of course that's difficult to evaluate. But if their gains were in proportion, I think you'd see these crazy spikes like what you're saying about these researchers becoming gazillionaires. And it just doesn't seem to happen. Which is not to say there's no difference—but 1) the improvements seem to be by smaller factors than what engineers believe 2) they don't seem to generalize as much as is often claimed: afaict, a significant aspect of the gains has to do with reducing impedance mismatch between problem domain and language (but advocates will typically adopt a stance that the language is just intrinsically superior). I would be very interested to hear counter-examples if people have them (I know the PG/Viaweb/Lisp story).