Very true. Working on a proglang is more like running a marathon than a 100 meters.
Another thing that would surprise people is that how few complex data structures or subtil algorithms are required. For example in styx-lang, my little retard baby language, there is literaly no binary searches, no sorting, no hash map, no hash sets, yet it is still fast because actually a compiler most of the time only has to deal with very small vectors (5 parameters, 10 enum members, 15 statements in a body, etc.)