That's why I've always told people that I'm a "studio musician" developer. Not a rock star, but a competent professional the studio calls when they need to make a record.
That's what I'd been saying for a while -- the best devs are session musicians. They have enough all-around comoetence to deliver what is asked for for that particular recording.
Normaly session musicians are better than rock stars James Jameson (funk brothers) was a better bassist than Paul McCartney, and Paul would admit that.
I have worked with a Musician with Phd in music who taught him self coding after an accident broke all the bones in his feet (drink had been taken)
It was fun in the pub when some hit tracks came on he would say ah I think that's one of mine :-)
It's not "free", they give it away to sell ads. With Microsoft, before the constant update stuff, you could at least say you buy version X of product Y and then you have that, like some tool in a tool shed. Now that's a shifting mess of attached strings, too, but Google was never anything but that.
Some of my favorite memories are of learning C++ using the nano editor. I ended up a C# dev, put I still put nano on all my Windows boxes. It can be quite handy.
