In 2010 Elif Batuman wrote Get A Real Degree. Obstensibly a book review, it gave her space to unload on an era that produced a writing glut.

This quote stuck out ot me.

That’s the torture of walking into a bookshop these days: it’s not that you think the books will all be terrible; it’s that you know they’ll all have a certain degree of competent workmanship, that most will have about three genuinely beautiful or interesting sentences and no really bad ones, that many will have at least one convincing, well-observed character, and that nearly all will be bound up in a story that you can’t bring yourself to care about. All that great writing, trapped in mediocre books! Who, indeed, has time to read them?

Programming languages can be categorized in a number of ways: imperative, applicative, logic-based, problem-oriented, etc. But they all seem to be either an “agglutination of features” or a “crystallization of style.” COBOL, PL/1, Ada, etc., belong to the first kind; LISP, APL– and Smalltalk–are the second kind. It is probably not an accident that the agglutinative languages all seem to have been instigated by committees, and the crystallization languages by a single person