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obsession with how quick something is to understand immediately and be productive in—he gives the example of building websites in a single day, and contrasts it to musicians learning and mastering instruments over much longer periods of time.That's an entirely orthogonal concern to what the article is about.
I agree that obsessing over the "zero to proficiency" time the way we do nowadays is very much counterproductive, for the reasons you mentioned. But you also want to be quick for a different reason - to make the tool better for the already-proficient user.
Rich also talked a lot about essential vs. accidental complexity. I don't know about you, but myself, the more I code, the more I feel 90%+ of my time spent on coding, and even a good chunk of the design/architecting time, is accidental complexity. This is not just a matter of bad APIs and overcomplicated design - the whole process of programming just takes too fucking long. The languages we use are not expressive enough, not succinct enough to capture our solutions. The tooling we use is not powerful enough to allow for an efficient exploration of the solution space.
So the other day I was writing some glue between two incompatible systems. I had my data structures well designed, I know how all the operations mapped. I would be able to write you a precise description of everything in an hour. It still took me more than a week to code it up. All the classes, functions, modules, files, syntax issues, gluing different types of error handlers, baah. Midway, I figured I made a mistake in the design. I knew how to correct it in 30 seconds. It would take a single sentence to explain the problem and the solution. It still took me an hour to implement the fix, because I had to change type signatures, move some files around, and update half a dozen places because it turns out you can't just automatically make bulk modifications in languages that aren't Java or C#. And don't get me started on how much time it takes to figure out the structure of a subsystem in a legacy code base...
Point being, even if you know your language and problem space inside out, even if you have decades of coding behind you, day-to-day coding still takes way more work than it should.
To me, existing tooling feels conceptually too low-level. Writing feels too low-level. One may counter that typing is mechanical, programming happens in the head - that's true, but at least to me, typing (and especially editing) still has enough overhead that I feel my brain slowing down. The feedback loop is too slow.
What I'd currently love to have is code editing environment operating on high-level semantic concepts. One keychord to select a function and display all its callers and callees, in a graph. One keychord to select a parameter and display a diagram of how it flows through code. One key to start inserting a class. One key for adding, deleting or editing anything that isn't a name or comment. References, files, folder structures handled automatically. Etc. Because if testing a single design variation will take me 10 minutes instead of half a day, then I might be able to test a bunch of them instead of committing to first one that feels reasonable.
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