This is incredible insightful, and I wish more people thought this way. Computers are just a tool. Sometimes we get caught up in the shiny new toys and pursuit of some theoretical perfection, instead of just getting work done.

I'd bet, for every HN commenter extolling the virtues of some new language, framework or database, there are 10X that many developers quietly hacking away writing boring and ugly VB (and Perl, Java and whatever other languages people consider uncool) code on an ancient MySQL or SQL Server or MS Access database, solving real problems, and getting the job done. Which, in the end, is all that really matters.

(I consider myself a professional, I try to pick the right tools for the job, design maintainable systems, and write clean code, but at the end of the day, I'm paid to deliver value for the business, not build a monument of coding perfection. Life is full of tradeoffs)