Well there are more productive programmers and less productive ones. It's pretty obvious to me. I don't like trying to quantify it as 10x or 20x, because it's k

Well there are more productive programmers and less productive ones. It's pretty obvious to me. I don't like trying to quantify it as 10x or 20x, because it's kinda pointless to try and I don't view it as a scalar. I can't program graphics cards, but I can rebuild some of the data feeds that the Nasdaq pipes to hedge funds. I don't think a game developer could do what I do. It's the specialization that really counts, not the raw productivity, but raw productivity does count too. In terms of your example, yes. The problem with software is that a bad architecture can complete hobble it and there are plenty of cases with unbeautiful code that makes a pile of money. I think there is artistry in software, but that wasn't the primary reason I compared it to music. I was trying to express the vastness of the domain and the range of complexity and how one could find a part in the search space that is simple enough to be called easy. Hence the garage band metaphor. Not everyone is going to be writing compilers. Some people don't want to throw their brain at a heap of complexity all day long. They just want to make pretty buttons that have a satisfying snappiness to them and call it a day. What I'm trying to say is that there isn't one "programming" and for the people that need to hear "programming is easy, anyone can do it" in order to get the courage to try to take it up, I think that message is good. It doesn't mean they'll be working for Nasa on space probes, but they can make a comfortable living on low stakes stuff and have fun while they're at it.