I find that 'intelligent programmers' tend to write better code than 'programmers with intelligence'.
e.g. 'programmers with intelligence' can handle a lot of complexity and need to refactor a lot less, and thus can write messy code and get away with it.
'Intelligent programmers' understand that refactoring is essential and that clearly written, well structured code makes it easy to work with, and far less taxing on the brain.
What annoys me about it is that this meglomaniac is actually defining how we communicate with eachother online. What effect does this have on people's mentality? .. my guess is at least some!
while avoiding to make this a U.S. vs Europe thing, I'd be more interested in seeing other metrics (such as exit figures) rather than using that as the defining factor.
Clearly the U.S. is a world leader here, and always has been. But Europe is a large market, and a different type of consumer culture which needs to be catered for.
There are some impressive services operating in Europe right now. I was in Berlin recently, where there is a very large startup culture. I visited Europe's largest online gaming company, and was very impressed by their operation, and of course Soundcloud, the world's biggest music sharing service is also based in Berlin. Let's not forget that spotify and last.fm are also europe based, both excellent services. There seems to be a large amount of startups in Germany and Scandinavia as well as the UK. And, on a personal level, the Irish government is offering quite a good deal of aid and support to startups here, with a few success stories emerging.
True, we're not on the same level as the americans, but it is foolish to dismiss Europe.