Only the most ignorant would be fooled like this. And for them, until they learn otherwise, the tools at least will make them productive. For everyone else, like I said, there's no illusion, only utility.

i'm not sure what you're talking about. for vs, at least, there's no illusion - you move controls around in the designer and the code changes. or, you change the code and the controls move on the designer. nothing is hidden. you want to write custom positioning code? go ahead. you want flow layout, there are controls that provide that (usable from code or within the designer).

crap tools are crap, yes. not all tools are crap, though.

red paint isn't going to stop the gammas from Ba137.

The ui builder in vs generates (and parses) code that you would have had to write anyway. It doesn't hide anything from you any more than photoshop hides the work of setting pixel values. Does having to calculate and type in coordinate values by hand make you a better programmer?

The metro search is significantly slower than the old win7 start menu search.
It's cluttered with metro and web results so sometimes it doesn't even show what you're looking for.
You can't choose just files and settings to search for.
The sort order is reset every time you boot.

Infrequently rebooting boxes is a problem for you? You're doing it wrong.

Given that matter is significantly more mobile in water it's more like dumping a million tons of crap 25 meters from your house. You'd be ok with that, would you?

yeah, hardly an unbiased source, that.

the truth is that MS's JVM was more compatible and faster than any other VM (although the Semantec VM eventually caught up) at running 100% java-compatible applet code. sure, it was also capable of running non-compatible code but you could say the same about the browser, the OS and the machine in general.

Really? For a long time the MS JVM was the fastest and most compatible (according to Sun's own verification suite) VM available for any browser on any OS.

It's derived from Actionscript3, which itself is derived from JavaScript which is loosely derived from C. If you don't like squiggly bracket and full-featured type systems, then it's not for you.

Yeah just like Typescript which is open-source and distributed as a node package.

Oh, wait...

it's "new" enough that it doesn't run on 3 of the Macs in my household.

solaris boxes don't tend to run web browsers used by idiots that like to download the latest puppy screensaver from russia.

I'd eagerly buy a 15" Wuxga laptop.

but how many of those will make you sick?