A programmer's editor talking about how important programming is? And it being rated up high on Hacker News? Wow, who would've seen that coming! I donno abou

A programmer's editor talking about how important programming is? And it being rated up high on Hacker News? Wow, who would've seen that coming! I donno about the rest of y'all, but I'm a little tired of this self-serving "programmers are special" crap. IMHO there's a thick grey barrier between programmer and user, which gets thinner every day. Especially in the newer generations of users, who are far more accustomed to the ways that computers operate. Let's be honest: 75-90% of programmers use terrible languages to write terrible software -- internal applications in vendor-supplied crap languages. They're not special, they understand little more than a few complex if/then/else blocks, and they're the vast majority of programmers. We can argue that the upper crust of programmers are truly special, but if we could get rid of the garbage they had to interface with, I suspect their code could replace most of their own work as well.