The example of Facebook immediately comes to mind. I'm sure everyone has read articles about "TheFacebook" on the Harvard Crimson's website for a good chuckle. But reading those 2004 articles give insight to how Mark Zuckerberg succeeded despite not being a better programmer or computer science thinker than others (including faculty) at Harvard. He was not only competing with an already dominant MySpace, but Harvard computing services:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/2/9/hundreds-register...
> “I’m pretty happy with the amount of people that have been to it so far,” [Zuckerberg] said. “The nature of the site is that each user’s experience improves if they can get their friends to join it.”
> But Director of Residential Computing Kevin S. Davis ’98 said that the creation of a Harvard facebook was not as far off as Zuckerberg predicted.
> “There is a project internally with computer services to create a facebook,” Davis said. “We’ve been in touch with the Undergraduate Council, and this is a very high priority for the College. We have every intention of completing the facebook by the end of the spring semester.”
Doesn't seem like that Harvard-built-and-funded Facebook got very far. I'm also struck by how mundane the work of Facebook sounded (including the low salary), as described in this old article, when you compare it to, say, Clinkle:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/3/1/facebook-expands-...
> In order to expand, Moskovitz and Zuckerberg had to write computer programs that would “parse the course catalogs and student newspapers” of the additional schools. Following Columbia, Stanford and Yale, which Zuckerberg said took about three hours each to set up, he hopes to open the site up to Boston-area schools like Boston University and MIT.
As I get older, yes, I start to appreciate the foundational concepts as the OP does. But I think that programming's seemingly youth-centered churn of knowledge is not unrelated to how personal and malleable -- i.e. how varied the goal of programming is, because of how programming is so directly related to the work of how humans consume and disseminate knowledge.