> there’s nothing about software development that requires meatspace interactions
This is a big claim that is not true in my experience. Dealing with highly ambiguous situations, talking people out of bad ideas and learning through collaboration works much better in person.
I'd imagine it would be very hard to switch to that kind of model after all this time. Wouldn't guaranteeing a permanent level of support would likely involve hiring people and having to bring in enough to support them too?
It might not be that hard if you're motivated and have that vision, but I can completely understand someone not wanting the added pressure after all this time.
> The performance of a "for loop" is usually dog slow (some special cases were optimized recently). You often spend hours figuring out how to vectorize your code so it runs decently fast.
A similar story for Python and NumPy on this point, mitigated by NumPy's elegant broadcasting rules. Agree with everything else!