Tying The Knot
Chris Neukirchen has written an interesting article on what makes an excellent programmer.
The thing that’s missing is getting rid of all the abstraction again, to tie the knot, usually by means of a compiler. Computers aren’t made to run maths, they are made to run code. Fortunately, that code even can take maths and produce code, but to make it do that it needs an excellent programmer.
In other words, the ability to exploit metaprogramming to write otherwise expensive abstractions in efficient ways.