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Sounds like you're contradicting the analogy but not the main point.

Many people would be completely happy with bowling a 160. In many contexts that's a great outcome.

But if you as a developer want to break past the equivalent stage of (beginner) expertise in any of the possible specializations or fields, you have to understand how to keep learning past the "know enough to be dangerous" phase.

Writing code functionally, vs procedurally, vs message oriented. Writing code with control flow vs data flow, and toggling between them. Crafting abstractions vs composing them. Many small parts put together elegantly vs one straightforward transparent monolith. Some skills are alternates, you can go either way and get as good results.

Many developers stop at one paradigm and avoid stretching themselves further out of discomfort. Other developers learn a new paradigm but never reach the point of understanding its limitations, while having convinced themselves that they're an expert on that paradigm. From what I've seen it doesn't really matter which paradigm, language, toolset, or discipline you're talking about, this particular behavior happens all the time, and it matches the "expert beginner" label pretty well.



To be fair, the very first line in the OP says they don't buy the analogy, not that they don't buy the main point.


It wasn't obvious to me that it was purely about the analogy:

There are people who only know a few things. But on a suitably scoped project, that may be fine.

That's sort of a counterpoint to the main point, which is why I wanted to pull the discussion back to the main point.




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