A practitioner can see that tools below theirs lack features, and cannot see what tools above theirs offer, because they lack the concepts to miss them.
Graham's programmer, fluent in a hypothetical middling language, looks down the power continuum and sees deficiency, then looks up and sees only strangeness. The asymmetry is the point and it generalises past programming: absence of a concept is invisible from below, so the practitioner's own sense of sufficiency is not evidence of it.
In practice
- A team confident its tooling is adequate is reporting that it cannot imagine what it lacks.
- A reviewer who finds an unfamiliar method needlessly complicated may be describing their own position on the continuum.