What sets a great developer apart from the rest

What you say is true enough, but, BUT, I'm guessing that you have not used nor worked with LISP or a LISP-like language yet, so here is the counterpoint essay to your essay:

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

I'm not submitting this because I'm trying to be mean or anything, I'm trying to offer you an expanded viewpoint which might assist you in whatever development goal you might establish for yourself.

Now, usually when this essay is criticized, the criticism comes in the form of "Viaweb was written in LISP but when it was sold to Yahoo they converted it to C++ because nobody there could understand it".

To which I have to say:

"Exactly".

Not understanding LISP and LISP-like languages and criticizing them is like understanding BASIC and shell scripting and criticizing C++, without knowing C++.

In other words, there's something there.

Also, you might want to read Joel Spolsky's essay: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s... and read point #9: "Do you use the best tools money can buy?"

I as a programmer, like you, can use any programming language or tool to get any job done, but inferior tools, unclean code, complexity, and ambiguous requirements documents cost me something which is far too valuable to spend, and that is my TIME. If an employer wants to pay for that, great, but my opinion is that if you can save time without losing software quality, then whatever you can do to do that is worth it.

But, it's just an opinion.