[koz_]

> 'In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few'

This is a great quote. Once one knows how to do something the "right" way it becomes very difficult to do it any other way. That said, perhaps true expertise isn't about knowing the correct solution to a given problem, and is rather about realising that problems themselves can be changed in order to permit different, more desirable solutions.

I think one of the most common ways in which programmers fail is by immediately accepting a problem as a given and jumping into the solution space. So often we will come up with a perfect solution to a stated problem, when a slightly different problem has a 10x cheaper / safer / faster solution.

[WalterBright]

And that's the reason 10x programmers exist!

I sometimes get support questions in the form of "I need feature X". I ask "what problem are you trying to solve." They tell me, and I say "oh, just do this" and the problem is solved.