"I think there are two mind sets when it comes to programming, those that relish in learning every detail in a particular technology and those that find beauty

"I think there are two mind sets when it comes to programming, those that relish in learning every detail in a particular technology and those that find beauty in simplicity. (technically there is probably a third which is just a hack). I don't think that these two programmer see eye to eye. One looks to apply the chains of functions to a problem to simplify the task at hand. While the other looks to creatively attack the problem with a minimalistic approach to writing code. They find beauty in recursion and abstraction, through interfacing things so that common logic can provide different results based on plug-able interfaces." You've essentially just described the difference between a left-brained person and a right-brained person, although I'm not sure this has much to do with whether you like using libraries or not. Left-brained people use the language centers of their brain more heavily. That's why they spend so much time trying to come up with the right names, adding comments, and adding documentation while ignoring useful abstractions. Right-brained people build instinctual models in their heads. That's why they spend so much time thinking out interfaces and how things fit together and so little time thinking about the semantics. The only thing I'd be careful of is in using terms like "simplicity", "creativity", and "elegance". The left-brained guy thinks his code is just as simple, elegant, and creative as the right-brained guy thinks his is. The difference is what they're measuring these things by. In general, I think the ultimate goal is for these two types to learn working together. That can be a very great thing for a team, but can be fairly frustrating.