It's one thing for J.K. Rowling to write Harry Potter outlines on cocktail napkins. A pen and a cocktail napkin can be quite the foundation for expression, indeed. But the same flexibility lets other people doodle, and still others blow their nose.

The capacity to enable greatness is neither the same as the encouragement to enable greatness, nor the guarantee to enable greatness, and there's a lot of survivor's bias at the top of the Ruby and Rails communities.