You seem like you would enjoy programming in FORTH or perhaps LISP. I've never had much interest in either, I've always liked the modern crop of OOP languages,

You seem like you would enjoy programming in FORTH or perhaps LISP. I've never had much interest in either, I've always liked the modern crop of OOP languages, but they seem perfect for out of the box thinkers, they're specifically meant for people with ideas that go outside of what's already out there. Forth is especially interesting since it's the one language where it's very common to build your own implementation. Have you spent much time with either? I wonder what tech would look like if it were less hostile to out of the box thinkers. Probably we would have a lot of really neat stuff, even though we do things in boring repetitive ways for a reason, it allows people with mediocre skills to produce great results be sacrificing elegance instead of predictability. When I first got into tech, I did a lot more myself. None of my ideas were at innovative, most were copies of things I'd seen somewhere, but I wasn't familiar with what existing tools were out there, why I'd want to use them, what kind if features I'd want on real world projects, etc. It wasn't so much that I had these amazing ideas I wanted to share, but I was attached to the genius innovator myth, like on Jimmy Neutron or Blankman or something. Everyone wants to be the on who discovers something great, but none of what I was doing actually seemed to be that great, I was just doing NIH and telling myself it was, plus being too lazy and full of task inertia to learn the industry solutions. As time went on I got more and more into just using what everyone else uses, exactly the way it was meant to be used, and rethinking my whole approach if I found myself doing anything remotely outside what "the documentation for plebs" wants me to do. I think it might be pretty cool to be able to think on multiple levels like that, seeing how things work, and having vision of how they could be better, outside of minor incremental improvements to existing tools.