The part about us being teachers more than engineers or programmers jumped at me. I've long held the belief that code should be written far more for those reading it than for the machine executing it. Your comment builds on that and made me think of this mantra: "The machine executing my code to produce an application is a side-effect. The main purpose of my code is to teach others how I control the machine into producing the application".

This, of course, holds in a setting where multiple people work together to build a sizeable codebase. There are many other settings where adopting this mantra would be counter-productive.