Example:
The dam scrip kiddies keep reinventing the wheel and coming out with new stuff all the time for literally no reason.
I will explain why this is, right now. It's REALLY obvious.
I'm about to give the community here the reason for something important, that should form a framework for later discussions.
We rattle around a lot on this board bitterly complaining about the industry. How it demeans and denigrates experience, accomplishments, and character. How developers invent and push new crap continually for absolutely no good reason at all - even when it's repetitive, broken, isn't really any good, is unwieldy, and/or is unreliable.
Here's the unified field theory on this subject. Please everyone, drop the aspie naivete about human nature... People are ALL motivated by vanity and the need to feel better than the next guy/person....
You know how weight lifters lift weights, and how useless that activity by itself is except to increase muscle mass, but has ABSOLUTELY no benefit other than that as well as bragging rights, reputation, winning awards and respect?
IT IS EXACTLY THE SAME THING WITH PROGRAMMING. EXACTLY. So stop complaining cause you will NOT change human nature.
Programmers are the athletes, the weight lifters of the brain.
This means:
USELESS HARD WORK - pushing against almost immovable resistance for no good reason except to show your strength - IS NORMALIZED. REINVENTING THE WHEEL IS NORMALIZED. BEING SCORNFUL OF EASIER WAYS IS NORMALIZED.It's totally, quite obviously built into the culture of CS and IT. I used to do it. VB developers or FoxPro developers were supposed to be retards who would not learn the obviously superior compiled languages like Visual C++ (a monstrosity.) That's the vain dumbass young programmer speak thinking.
Please, aspies, note this before you go off in the dark going "durr hurr hurr it unfair durr slobber".
Everything programmers do to churn up the occupation and create false progress - extensions to proven languages that have no net benefit, heavy APIs, verbose documentation, ever increasing syntax complexity of long established tools like C++ -
All have ONE AGENDA:
Make things in computer science VERY VERY HARD to approach for the first time.
So developers now in the game will feel empowered, powerful, better than outsiders, and part of a kindred race of "brain brawn".
Actual real world weight lifting doesn't cater to experience, age, good intentions, or accomplishments. Only pure muscle is respected.
CS is the process of making things really hard for the next guy to take over your code.
How could all of you people be so obtuse?
IT'S NOT ABOUT PRODUCTIVITY!!!!!! HELLO. IT'S ABOUT DICK WAVING AND ASSERTING YOUR PURE STRENGTH TO WADE THROUGH SELF CREATED HARDSHIP.
I mean, really. This is observation 101 IF. YOU. JUST. STEP. BACK.
I DEFY ANYONE ON THIS BOARD TO identify ONE, JUST ONE!!!! way that computer science permanently embraced some important simplification that makes things easier. Also to counter the reaction that "proper businesses just wouldn't accept programmers diddling around wasting time inventing hard stuff to test themselves"... BZZZT BZZZT NAIVE.
Don't be naive. Executives and owners have NO idea that their techies are lying to them, or not. Every techie follows other techies to make their job harder, like a herd.
So executives and owners never see this constant erosion of value in the service of programmer ego and dick-waving. They talk with other owners or executives that are in exactly the same environment.
Young programmers in the game have a de facto monopoly on defining the rules of the playing field. You need them to keep your IT running. And when you have them, they will unwittingly participate in this overall competitive wastefulness.
Last point: Programmers doing this stuff probably have no idea they're doing it. First of all they have no experience to show them that the "improvements" are bullshit. Their experience in industry goes back 3-5 years, not 15-25 years to really see how things get harder for no real reason.
Secondly they are personally invested in the mindset because they need to keep their job or find a job and lead techies will be as invested as anyone in the waste/mental weight lifting mentality. Programming is a social environment. You have to subscribe to the memes that everyone else does if you want a job.
You WILL see programmers adopt mantras/memes such as DRY (don't repeat yourself) and conserving activities such as reducing verbosity of code.
However, in almost EVERY instance, programmers economize on the surface level complexity of their creations while burying mountains of complex assumptions and defaults under the surface. Developers tend over time to make things APPEAR simpler, on the surface. But the knowledge required to approach the subject matter always increases.