Yeah, the article seems like it's several different claims and arguments. Yes, robotic is hard with no general solution visible and with the solutions readily a

Yeah, the article seems like it's several different claims and arguments. Yes, robotic is hard with no general solution visible and with the solutions readily a available to companies turning out to be from people who've spent a decade "squinting" at the problem, know the rules of thumb for a bunch things that work and don't work and still build things that are less than ideal. From this, yes, there are many ways that creating a simplified API in a conventional programming language seems useless. But as an argument against any "turn a hundred newbies loose", it seems not right. It seems plausible newbies to robotics could find paradigms that don't currently exist. I mean, robotics seems to be in the state that pre-deep-learning computer vision generally was in. Nothing worked "out of the box" and you needed experts to make the random smattering of approach that did exist work. Now we have an out-of-the-box working approach and I'm pretty sure it didn't come from existing experts.