[austin-cheney]

Yeah, I just like simple light weight code editors that open quickly. Notepad++ is super old, but its still incredibly popular and maintains a faithful following. VS Code is super popular because it tries to not be an IDE like the actual Microsoft Visual Studio IDE. Its also why I never liked Eclipse, because it just feels really slow.

At any rate, I was thinking about what I wrote earlier. Why is it that there is a direct correlation between code vanity and self-orientation?

I think the answer is anxiety. Some people cannot start from a clean slate. There is too much uncertainty in making original decisions. They just need a little bit of guidance and some people need so much guidance it feels like copy/paste. The more fearful or cowardly a person becomes the more fear avoidance becomes the paramount concern. At the extreme end, like layers of frameworks super-imposed upon each other in JavaScript land, the more autistic it feels to me. At the extreme end nothing matters more than immediate comfort from already known patterns, and everything else becomes a holy war.

[skydhash]

You don't even have to start from a clean slate. There's a lot of materials that outline design choices and their impact. I believe it's mostly not applying YAGNI. They come up with the kitchen sink, and then proceeds to have breaking changes shortly as they always make a mistake somewhere. And then you have people cargo-culting the sink and piling more on top of it.

Complex problems exists, but any complex solution I've seen is something that tries to solve many problems at once.