> 99.5% of programming consists of gluing together calls to library functions. Actually, different languages do make this part different. Because you might glu

> 99.5% of programming consists of gluing together calls to library functions. Actually, different languages do make this part different. Because you might glue together something other than "call", i.e. good functional languages have abstractions that blur the code and data boundary. If all interesting ideas were at the expense of code reuse, learning new programming languages would be a fools errand. Improving the last mile of whatever you are doing is an O(1) improvement of total cost — it doesn't even show up in productivity expressed as a rate. The real compelling belief behind programming languages is much more exciting, namely that we can express better ideas together in reusable ways, invest that productivity into better languages and rolls, and repeat that process ad infinitum. This is a crazy railgun of a concept. Incidentally, this is why startups as PG likes are a failed way to advance technology. Startups, focused on a limited 5 year window and that last mile, are structurally incapable of working on generalized infrastructure. The proliferation of b2b over b2c on recent years belies that, but replacing the current ossified FOSS Monopoly (our commons) with b2b bulkanization could restore competition in the means of production, but that bulkanization will also prevent the code reuse that create enough payoff to power the continued reinvestmemt. Tl;Dr PG sees good languages as a way to do one-off great man history-style heroic inventions, I see good languages as a way to unlock factorio-style continuous high capital investment.