I believe we are all at the forefront of programming. Our field as a science is less than a hundred years old. To speak of the Medieval Ages would be too kind; Rather, we are still groping around as cavemen, still discovering which berries are sweet and which are poisonous. Frankly, all programmers are flipping morons at this point. In terms of what we know now as a consensus, and what is yet to be learnt, we know less than 1% of what it means to program effectively. Whether you're a high frequency trading performance tuner with multiple collegiate degrees, or perhaps a script kiddy fresh from your first few lines of LEGO coding, the difference between these points of competence, when inevitably measured against the sea of knowledge to come as our field matures in another century, pales to insignificance. Everybody's still skinning cats, in a billion Rubegoldbergesque different ways.
I would say that well into or past the middle ages. We're already starting to break into a post-programming era.
Meanwhile the programming languages and tools we have are not being effectively applied. I expect this to improve as there is convergence of aspects that work well being adopted by more and legacy vestiges that aren't as important as it was when hardware performance was a much greater factor.
There's nothing wrong with healthy debate about languages. Definitely there is some religious stuff that enters the discussion, but I find critique, even more so of popular languages that should have enough "confidence" not to care if someone criticizes, is generally stimulating
It's okay to not like things. Just don't be a dick about it to the people that use them or imply that the people that use them are lesser because of it. The people that use those things almost certainly agree with you, but leading into conversations with toxicity makes the introspection part of people's brains turn off. If you want to have a productive conversation about something, doing that is antithetical to your goals.
