I agree with your comment, I don't think we say different things. In particular, cherry-picking something you said: > The economics of a few people developing

I agree with your comment, I don't think we say different things. In particular, cherry-picking something you said: > The economics of a few people developing high performance languages that everyone can use just makes too much sense I agree: high performance is the job of a _few_ people. It doesn't hurt to know basics for it for everybody else, but even then... that's just one area out of many a dev could dive into. Maybe security or virtualisation or OS programming or whatever would be just as useful or more. My point is that we can't pick a random subfield of software engineering and say "everybody should be skilled at that"