Very thorough explanation that I definitely agree. I love watching Soccer and Basketball. In those two fields, the best players are those who dedicate themselv

Very thorough explanation that I definitely agree. I love watching Soccer and Basketball. In those two fields, the best players are those who dedicate themselves to the game. Lionel Messi, Christiano Ronaldo, Michael Jordan, LeBron, Kobe. The list goes on. They have the same trait: passion and dedication. Some may have born with the skill (Ronaldo, LeBron). Some takes time to develop (Jordan, Messi). Having said that, our field is a little bit strange because there's a divide between being good at a particular set of skills and being jacks of all trades. For example: we tend to argue and discuss the topic of how learning new programming language can change the way you think about a particular problem and hence make a conclusion that those who put the effort and time to learn niche language such as Erlang, LISP dialect, Ruby, Lua get this automatic recognition as a "better programmer". (They may be a "better" programmer if we compare it to John Doe Programmer, but are they truly a better programmer?) On the other side of the coin, we have people like James Gosling, Bjarne Stroustrup, John Carmack, Dennis Ritchie, Joshua Bloch, Guido von Rossum, Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, etc. that are pretty much sticking with one or two languages but truly focus on their problem domain (as oppose to the languages that they use). There seem to be a group of people who are good at plumbing different technology and get something out of it and there are another set of group of people who specialized in specific technology but they're just... awesome at it. Example: A typical blog article explaining the full-stack of technology => "We use Rails as front-end, MongoDB as our back-end, memcached for our caching layer, ActiveMQ for our queueing system" vs "Here's the architecture of Mailinator: Java and Tomcat" (http://paultyma.blogspot.ca/2006/12/architecture-of-mailinator.html http://paultyma.blogspot.ca/2006/12/architecture-of-mailinat...) PS: Kent Beck and Martin Fowler may not have the "proper" HN street cred but they are definitely put their sweat, effort, and time to get better at what they do (OOP, software design/development, software process).