Sounds like a great idea for a new paradigm... I'll call it "pain-oriented programming". As you can imagine, the goal of this paradigm is to induce as much pain

Sounds like a great idea for a new paradigm... I'll call it "pain-oriented programming". As you can imagine, the goal of this paradigm is to induce as much pain in the programmer as possible. The reason is that, as all snobby programmers know, pain = enlightenment. If you have not rescued a Visual Basic project from the pit of despair (as much as Visual Basic code can be rescued), you are not a real developer. If you have not mastered the art of rolling your own XML reader--in Java, no less--you are not a real developer. If you have not written your own PHP class autoloader and associated model-view-controller framework, you are not a real developer. The philosophy of a real developer is that if you ever use someone else's code, you have avoided pain, and thus enlightenment. Enlightenment brings perfect code. The realest of the real roll their own operating systems, complete with custom assembler instructions, and they would never stoop to following a tutorial. Tutorials are the wussies' playthings. To achieve enlightenment, you must achieve the three essential qualities: confusion, anger, and despair. Wussy programmers avoid these things. Pain-oriented programming may be organized according to units of frustration. Our taxonomy of frustrations includes three types: code frustration, developer frustration, and meta-frustration, the last of which deals with the anguish of being frustrated at being frustrated so much. Pain-oriented programming aims to maximize all of these frustrations. Wussy programmers, on the other hand, love frameworks, code reuse, and Maven repositories. Wussy programmers are content to avoid reinventing the wheel (a necessary first step for all real programmers), because they have concerns for such silly frivolities as deadlines, maintainability, and standards. The minute you begin to care about anything other than perfect code, you stray from pain, and you might as well stick to writing in cute kiddie languages like Alice.