[dismalaf]

I'd argue a lot of current programming definitely is.

How much foundational technology is actually being created? How many new OSes have there been in the last 30 years? Almost everything that's currently being built is built on top of many layers.

And why is this a bad thing?

When I was in university using R to solve economics problems I wasn't thinking to myself, "This is too easy, I'm just using a scripting language, I need to rewrite everything that's in CRAN myself". No, I was happy that so much foundational tech is already there to make our lives easy.

And when someone ships a game in Unreal or Unity they're probably happier to ship than regretting not writing their own engine.

Also, being in Canada, I can't legally call programming "software engineering" lol.

[littlestymaar]

This response has nothing to do with the original point I made though, which has nothing to do with “foundational technology”, btw. When people write games in Unity the game is actually written in C#, sure the engine isn't, but that doesn't change the fact that the game is, and calling that “scripting” just because it's built on top of another layer makes no sense, because as you say, everything is built on top of another layer!