Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.

The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.

Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.

Progress is possible only if we train ourselves to think about programs without thinking of them as pieces of executable code.

The tools we use have a profound and devious influence on our thinking habits, and therefore on our thinking abilities.

Yes, I share your concern: how to program well -though a teachable topic- is hardly taught. The situation is similar to that in mathematics, where the explicit curriculum is confined to mathematical results; how to do mathematics is something the student must absorb by osmosis, so to speak. One reason for preferring symbol-manipulating, calculating arguments is that their design is much better teachable than the design of verbal/pictorial arguments. Large-scale introduction of courses on such calculational methodology, however, would encounter unsurmoutable political problems.

Industry suffers from the managerial dogma that for the sake of stability and continuity, the company should be independent of the competence of individual employees.