[amelius]

If you have a team with 10 programmers, only 1 of them needs to be smart enough to pick the right tools for the other 9.

Also, I think tools are converging in the most important areas. So eventually it will not matter much which tools you use.

[nostrademons]

That's not actually how high-functioning teams work. If you have one person make all the decisions and pick all the tools, you will have one highly-productive programmer and 9 disengaged programmers who go through the motions of writing code but usually end up creating more work that the one highly-productive programmer will have to undo. End result, he gets burned out, the product never ships, and the 9 disengaged programmers never actually learn how to program.

I've been on teams where everybody understands how a compiler is built & when you'd want to write one, why & when performance matters, how Lisp idioms can translate to C++, when you might want to machine-learn a model and why you might want to do it manually first, and many other basic CS concepts. The difference is night & day from teams that are filled with people who just follow a tutorial and copy/paste examples from StackOverflow. In general, I've found that a team moves at the pace of the slowest member of the team - fill a team with 1 smart guy and 9 folks who just follow their leads and you might as well have just hired the 1 smart guy.