I'm going to add something that isn't being mentioned here who's impact is underappreciated I think, and that's the idea of developers as craftsmen. Normally wh

I'm going to add something that isn't being mentioned here who's impact is underappreciated I think, and that's the idea of developers as craftsmen. Normally when you learn a craft, you eventually reach a sort of mastery, in the old guild system this was a literal title that you acquired. Once you became a master it's not like things stood still, you were constantly refining your techniques and innovating; but something I've noticed about master craftsmen is that they are extremely conservative in their tools. Even if they know that theoretically a new tool would allow them to do something with greater ease, they have already put in the time to learn to do that thing with the tooling they have, and they understand that, if they are ever considering adopting a new tool, the tradeoff has to be immensely in its favour. Often they will adapt the tools they've already spent perhaps decades using, rather than a completely foreign tool. They build a deep mental and physical model of how these things work, and it allows them both a social prestige in demonstrating their ability to do something that others can't with the same tools, and clarity of purpose to not spend their time constantly overwriting their prior knowledge. You can see this in programming with, for instance, really serious C programmers, who've had decades to internalise the craft and to this day can do anything they need to with C89, or particularly C99. I think that humans have an inherent need to acquire this feeling of mastery over a domain. Consciously or not, I think webdevelopers have their morale sapped by the constant demand that they relearn how to do the most basic parts of their craft with entirely new tools every few years. Because of this cycle, they are robbed of both the inherent fulfillment of truly learning a craft, and the social prestige that comes with it. That's why it's so irksome to have the newly minted college graduate pushing these new shiny things constantly, it undermines the opportunity to experience gaining true mastery of the domain, both in terms of having to constantly relearn new skills, and in destroying any social prestige which comes with what little deep knowledge of "legacy" systems the developer has accumulated through practicing their craft. This situation runs totally counter to the human spirit in my estimation.