> we need those people as much or more than we need engineers

I don't know about "more than". Eloquent yappers who can't code are a dime a dozen, and largely fungible. Jaron IS an engineer. And also an artist, and a musician.

Scientific American invited him to illustrate the cover of their 1984 issue on Computer Software, showing a visual music program.

>Jaron designed the musical visual program (which Scott Kim cited in his thesis) on the cover of the September 1984 Scientific American on Computer Software (a wonderful issue, with many articles about programming languages and software by some amazing people).

https://www.scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa/1984/09-01/

For more concrete examples of the kind of software development and visual programming and hardware research and development that Jaron has done, see my post below with all the links:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24266722