@nprofile1q... Jesus wept.
I wonder is it a kind of Eternal September that's now part and parcel of the profession of software development?
Look at the early pioneers of ideas in software; sure, there was low-hanging fruit, but work like mapping relational algebra to a declarative English-like syntax (Chamberlain and Boyce, 1974), Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad (1963) which embedded so many fruitful ideas and - to pick another very random example - Ken Thompson's genius implementation in 1973 of Doug McIlroy's pipelines, in which he chose the user-facing | symbol that makes the concept so easy to grasp - none of those are obvious, even in hindsight.
The demand for programmers has increased steadily since the 1950s and the commercialisation of computing machines. (I can't easily lay my hands on any graphs, but we've both lived this over our careers.) This sounds really reactionary, but I can't help thinking that as more people enter the field, the less chance the average software developer has to be mentored by someone who's truly a master, and in turn go on to strive for and achieve mastery themselves, having understood what mastery is. In the 1990s, at the same company, I got to work with three very very different, but all equally masterful programmers who understood their craft at a level that's very unusual today - from the capabilities and undefined behaviours of the languages they used and their standard libraries, via the operating system APIs and implementation details and hardware characteristics and down to the bits, and into the analogue-posturing-as-digital hardware.
Over my career, I've met fewer and fewer of those masters, despite more and more people entering the craft. Surely the number of masters should be going up in proportion to the number of people in the field? Why hasn't that been my experience?
