At the risk of being perceived to move the goalposts, I think there is a real lesson to engage with: empirically, for large classes of programmers, syntax, uni

At the risk of being perceived to move the goalposts, I think there is a real lesson to engage with: empirically, for large classes of programmers, syntax, uniformity, and absence of boilerplate actually make a larger difference in out-the-gate productivity than many would like to admit. I understand that this isn't a lesson about programming per se, but I think it's a lesson about the practice of programming. I see this repeatedly in our internship program, where people often ask after we "promote" them to other language work "Why can't XYZ look as clean and simple as Python?". I do think that's a lesson worth learning, and it's a little hard to learn except by osmosis. If I just tell someone "empirically, syntax matters a lot more than you might think in doing real work" it's easy to dismiss as understood-but-not-important. Jonathan Blow has a bit in one of his videos about "understanding" vs "really viscerally understanding", and I think this is one area where the latter simply can't be achieved without direct experience.