That's not the point.

If you code to please your boss, you do the best job you can. You eventually learn that the simple solution gets the job done faster and results in more robust, easier to maintain code.

If you code to please a web forum, you create the most complex code you can manage, in case someone ever has to look at it. You want them to be satisfied you've learned your minutiae, and that you've been clever, and that you understand complex things.

The external dependencies don't actually make the work go faster. Programmers use them because other programmers use them. Web forums tell them to do it this way. It's a safe solution. And if your career is nothing but choosing safe solutions from web forums, you never develop the skills to do things yourself, or the confidence that you *can* do things yourself.

If by that you mean javascript bloat, then yes, developers have made a mess of the web. For example, a typical product page on Amazon is 1.8M of *minified* javascript.

The problem is that developers no longer answer to their bosses. They answer to web forums. They are so afraid of doing things other programmers wouldn't find acceptable that they'll code to please web forums rather than doing their job. That means using the heaviest frameworks available and writing the deepest, most complex code they can manage to understand themselves.

fucking shareholders

Aren't you just awesome.

If nobody responds, then it was only seen by a few people. Facebook stopped showing it to people when the first few didn't respond.

Facebook keeps reverting your newsfeed to "top stories" (from "latest stories"), so most people are only seeing the most popular posts. And how often are a geek's posts popular? You post, nobody reacts, you hate the platform.

When you post, Facebook shares is with just a couple of the people who have reacted to your posts (like, share, comment) before. If they don't react, your post isn't shared with anyone else. If they do react, Facebook shares it with a few more people. They react? More people see it.

Like most geeks, who aren't sharing pictures of friends and food and generally displaying a charmed life, my posts are about things and projects and happenstance and other boring stuff nobody cares about. I post it, Facebook shares it with a couple people who don't respond, and Facebook kills it. Nobody sees it, I don't bother posting it anymore.

Admit it, this is how your facebook experience goes, too. So you post to slashdot how useless and intrusive Facebook is.

Since the 90's programming has become about minutiae, and not about problem solving. "Programmers" strive to please web forums full of their socially-awkward-but-now-connected peers, rather than their bosses. They test each other during interviews to make sure they are hiring someone autistic who has learned some useless facts rather than looking for people who can solve problems and talk to people. They saddle their employers with flavor-of-the-week technologies because they are so afraid of doing something a webforum didn't approve of that they won't write anything themselves. They *pride* themselves in not writing things themselves. They turn simple problems into large projects by bringing in "frameworks" and other webforum-approved technologies they can put on their resume, rather than solving the damned simple problem they were handed.

I never saw anything that a similar Linux counterpart, or a suite of Open Source counterparts could not do.

Then you didn't understand what they were doing. To suggest you can do the same on Linux is like suggesting you can use Gimp instead of Photoshop. It makes it sound like you don't do anything but resize photos, or the audio equivalent.

All of the DAWs and all of the sound libraries and all of the virtual instruments and all of the effects processing and all of the mastering software is on the Mac and on Windows. So is all the beatmaking software and the drivers for all the professional hardware interfaces. Any projects clients or friends bring you will be for a Windows or Mac suite of tools.

You can make music with Linux. People have made hit records with a lot less. But Linux is so far behind that using it for music is just a self-limiting, philosophical pat on the back.

Yelp is useless. They delete bad reviews. Amazon has a sycophant army marking bad reviews as unhelpful, but Yelp goes one further and just deletes them.

Malware thrives on code you didn't look at. You didn't look at it because you didn't write it. Some web forum told you it was the proper way to do things, so you used it, because you're more afraid to look bad to a web forum than you are of looking bad to your boss, and now you have the vulnerabilities that came with it.

Simpler code is more robust code. Simpler code is code you can fully understand. Simpler code is code you can modify, rather than being stuck with it because you're afraid to touch it. Simpler code is code you can modify, because you don't have to have your changes accepted by a web forum or a remote dev team that doesn't give a crap about your changes.

Code you wrote yourself is code malware authors don't already know how to exploit.

While there's some truth to this, the self-congratulatory attitude that comes with it has ruined the entire field.

Prior to the 90's, programming was about solving problems, and a good solution was a simple solution. Then soccer moms entered the field and programmers didn't feel so special anymore. (Exaggerating only slightly) They responded by making everything as complex as possible, and turned from problem solving to learning minutiae, so that only autistic people want to do the job, and now they can call themselves specially suited...because they made it that way. Programmers are now so afraid of doing something their peers would disapprove of, for fear of not demonstrating the minutiae they've learned, that they won't design solutions for themselves. Now they have to have frameworks and use accepted buzzwords that someone else made up to describe techniques someone else created, and they saddle their employers with having to support soon-to-be-obsolete technology that they spend more time getting to work than if they had just solved the damned not-very-complex problem they were given.

Judging from the way most programmers "refactor", the solution to complex code is to replace it with even more complex code, because something that employs as many technologies, buzzwords and frameworks-of-the-week is obviously better.

The correlation is probably the reverse of the one stated. With prosperity comes consumption of services, like internet access.

FWIW my vision is only marginally bad (I'm far-sighted, and getting worse with age), and I have corrective glasses, and even my very modest disability is helped by such an easy zoom. I use it constantly. It's such a natural and integral part of using my Mac that I forget about it when I contemplate switching from a Mac to something else...until I use something else.