[Subjective and intended to be a community wiki] I am sorry for such an offensive question: But here are my arguments Most of the progress in "computing" has came from non-programming sources. i.e. People invented faster microprocessors and better routers and novel memory devices. I dont think on average people are writting more efficient programs than those written 10 years ago. And the newer and popular languages are infact slower than C. though speed is one of the lesser criterias. Most of the progress came from novel paradigms. Web, Internet, Cloud computing and Social networking are novel paradigms and did not involve progress in programming as such. Heck even facebook was written in PHP and not some extreme language. Though it did face scalability issues (same with twitter) but i believe money and better programmers (who came in much later) took care of that. Thus ideating capability trumped programming capability/ Even things like Map-Reduce, Column oriented database and Probablistic algorithms (E.g. bloom filters) came from hardcore Algorithms research, rather than some programming convention. Thus my final point is why programming skill is so overstressed? To point a recent example about how only 10% of programmers can "write code" (binary search) without debugging. Isnt it a bit hypocritical, considering your real successs lies in coming up with better algorithm or a novel feature rather than getting right first time???