[joshuafcole]

I think the lines between "available library of existing code", language, and IDE are much murkier than they might appear. If one programmer is given raw assembly and the other Python, you're probably going to see at _least_ a 10x productivity bump to the python user _even if they use no additional libraries_. Language and IDE choices impact the vocabulary available to express solutions in the same way.

[vannevar]

You can certainly contrive a counter-example---even in 1986, you could say much the same thing about assembly and something like C or BASIC. But once that leap of abstraction was made, we seem to have hit a plateau of expressive power. Is the jump from C to Rust as empowering as the jump from assembly to C? I don't think it is.