I'm not saying that there aren't real, valid reasons for the state of things today to have evolved in the manner I described. And I completely agree that desig

I'm not saying that there aren't real, valid reasons for the state of things today to have evolved in the manner I described. And I completely agree that designing APIs well, and doing object-oriented design hierarchy well in the manner in which it was intended is a formidable problem domain. Never did I mean to imply that it wasn't. And certainly, there is a qualitative, artistic dimension to the way in which one goes about stringing various APIs together, too. Nevertheless, the fact remains that today when I - and many others - program, we're spending 90% of our time putting together the pieces of some reference. Back when I was growing up writing code in C, there wasn't so much of that, aside from the sparse library functions and, of course, system calls. I actually felt like I was writing a lot of code; maybe unnecessary code from a contemporary point of view (lots of linked list containers, hash table implementations, etc.), but definitely code, and I was writing it. There's something in that productive bliss that's gone today, when it's basically a question of figuring out what the javadocs say.